I will never understand why people follow “celebrities” on social media. Isn’t life already forcefully inundated with these overly self-important assholes as is? This is the same to me as people who go on YouTube to watch commercials; I just cannot fathom the appeal
On Twitter, I can see it. I always thought Twitter was a great place to do things like “Performing LIVE at the astro dome 2/31/2024! Tickets on sale now!” I could see following your favorite bands or comedians or whatever.
Depends on the celebrity. Neil Gaiman is actually pretty chill online. Takei too, but the amount of articles he posts started to annoy me, so I dumped him. I don’t really know what people see in Zuck, though.
I mean, how else do you propose to organize the sea of information that the internet is constantly swamped in? Individual personalities work as a pretty consistently navigable waypoint and information gatekeeper, a pretty decent filtration mechanism. Most other methods are somewhat vulnerable to corruption over time, or are less consistent, or demand higher maintenance for different tradeoffs.
Well @zuck (and @mosseri) are from Threads and, like @Mastodon, it makes sense a lot of people would first choose to follow the top leaders. I imagine the majority of those are actually legitimate users, though the Threads bubble also very quickly popped, so who knows how many are still active
What does this even mean, I can’t “follow” users on Jerboa. Is this some shit zuck added to his specific Threads then wanks about how he has all the followers?
I don’t necessarily think so. Following individuals (granted that you are actually doing so, and not following just an individual’s “brand”) is kind of a better way to guarantee that you’re going to get a consistent perspective. If you just followed topics, oh, here’s this perspective, this perspective, this perspective, ahhh, and it all becomes so much noise. Now you have to engage with the kind of, surface level summation of so many people’s cited sources and comments. It becomes harder to judge, potentially, harder to understand.
It’s like if you were trying to find a good video game to play.
You could search by genre, right, or, by “topic”, and that might get you some stuff that’s similar, but if you’ve ever tried to browse the steam store by just tags alone, you’ll find pretty quick how useless it is.
So, maybe you go by publisher, or, likewise, by magazine, by news site. That might be decent, for finding similar games, through a publisher, right, but it’s kind of a toss-up. If you like street fighter 6, it’s a toss up whether or not you like any of capcom’s other games. Same thing could be said of most publishers. And I don’t think you’re going to find consistent perspectives, necessarily, from kotaku, or even really useful information. It is the kind of, MO of a news company to flatten every journalists’ output into a kind of unified, easily consumable, inoffensive package, to bump up readership numbers and ensure they keep getting review copies, and ensure they keep hitting deadlines that line up with, or come a day or two before, release dates.
So, then you just go to one singular journalist. Now you can trust their perspective, now you can understand their tastes and where they line up with you and where they don’t. What they are possibly more predisposed towards reviewing. This is easier if they’re a private entity, rather than part of a larger model. Or, you could start following a single studio, or a single developer. Now you can understand what they are likely to produce in the future, as viewed through the lens of their past catalogue. Do they produce point and clicks? First person horror? Do they make games with particular subject matters that you find fascinating, or do they just have a kind of vibe that you like?
So that’s kind of why it would make sense to follow specific people, instead of just kind of, crowdsourcing your topics, and then following those collectively defined topics. One will give you the more consistent set of answers about what you’re looking for, one will give you a much broader net, and maybe will inform you more of the “cultural zeitgeist”, insofar as it exists among people who also want to make posts on those topics, to people who only want to follow those topics, and not follow the posters themselves. And I would, broadly, say the consistency is more important than “accuracy”, not that I think you’re going to get either from following topics and not people.
Not to normies who are people people and love short form posts by “thought leaders” or more realistically celebrities and corpo brands (like sports teams or Taylor swift) they want to ape or consume products of.
They never visited forums and got on the internet through mobile phones and Facebook, so the format of Reddit is strange and unfamiliar to them.
It’s always been this way and it’s why twitter was/is way more popular than Reddit, the naturally pseudonymous throwaway nature of Reddit accs made it all seem too impersonal for most people.
They probably see the internet as a whole as a negative and they think everyone is just there for ads and twitter and getting their dopamine systems hijacked instead of just actually wanting to be here and getting some kind of value out of it. All protests to the contrary are only seen as proof of their own theories.
Everyone who’s interested in tech be it fediverse, cryptocurrency or godforbid AI to them must be in it to make money because no normal person is interested in anything other than people and therefore must be a musk/zucc fan and is thus branded a tech bro.
Conservatives often end up accusing others of what they themselves are y’know.
Yeah, just this morning I was talking to a dude who was going around calling people normies and expected me to respond with other played out internet insults
Agreed, I had the same thing happen in this very thread where some x-twitter user engaged in wilful ignorance instead of wanting to be educated on why so much of the internet is the way it is now, unlike how it used to be, and unlike what it could’ve been. I hope that person is alright and maybe touching grass now.
Following individuals is weird, but being able to follow certain news outlets is less weird because then you’re creating your news feed around sources of news. Building around topics can lead to unreliable sources and people have to be more critical of what they read, which should be a good thing but in reality most people aren’t critical of the source.
That said, I prefer making topics central because it supports community building whereas making people/outlets central makes it a cult of personality/company.
Lemmy doesn’t work like that, lemmy is about communities and you can join communities here. But Mastodon, PixelFed and PeerTube don’t work like that, they are about people posting stuff and therefore you follow people.
Add comment