Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism.

For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.

> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.

There's nothing I can add to this.

>That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform.

Easily the best post on HN so far this year 2025, thanks.

Very messy situations that we're at the moment for our communications platform but sadly it's true.

> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.

Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.

The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.

Only someone who willfully forgets how terrible taxis are could say that.

Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages?

Is that the gist of it?

Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising.

That's not communication being lost, it's media.

It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way.

Yes, I'm over 50.

For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.”

I myself can compare this with the cultural state of Soviet Union. It was a very atheistic country on the surface; yet the art, the cultural scene, the newspapers, the cinema; the school education; the public forums (they existed in the form of letters to newspapers); everything was imbued with that idea that there are serious things, not everything is vanity. It wasn't dull or dark; it was very reviving, in fact, because it gave you the foundation, something firm to stand upon. There were fantastically funny comedies (I wish I could find modern comedies like that) but there was also seriousness. I still remember some journal pieces of that time that, I admit, formed me as a person. An essay about a relatively minor crime, for example: two women were bitten by guard dogs. Yet somehow it rose to your place in life; your approach to what life is; you and your responsibility for how you live. And these themes were everywhere. Until 1991.

I get what is being said, but i disagree with the framing. The "brainwashing" happened in two stages, and the first stage is perfectly logical.

Most people don't want just 1 identity, and they want separate spaces for being different.

If you're already OK with having two accounts on BBS, what is 1 or 2 accounts more for thefacebook.com?

Links to various editions: https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall...

Also of interest, notes about the observer being the observed in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things — https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 — and The First and Last Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom

Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.

Big tech social media is pushing you a stream of entertainment and pushing away from social interactions.

That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.

This time it is different, right? The first George Mills was correct in believing that, but we don't live in his times.

And so my Signal is solid 40% memes. Memes that someone carefully selected and sent me but still pure entertainment. No evil monopoly necessary to make it so.

Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives?

Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period.

Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.

So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?

> Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights

There are valid complaints about Uber, but most people consider it a materially better service than taxis most of the time. They vote that way with their wallets, long after VC subsidies ended, and often even when it costs _more_ than a taxi.

That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices).

Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes.

Fantastic read.

This isn't true. You can still meet in person or make a phone call.

As for news media... They tend to be at the beck and call of whoever owns them. Most of them use the same press agencies but promote political binaries to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.

Lost me on that one. Communication networks provide significant value and can be quite profitable. That's a whole industry.

and

>When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago,

I am confused.

Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.

I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.

Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.

For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)

But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).

This has been my biggest beef with Facebook. I have an FB account, but never use it, anymore. By walking away from it, there are a number of folks with whom I can no longer communicate.

In some cases, that’s fine, but in a couple, I sincerely miss them.

I like the idea behind the fediverse, but find it too “fiddly” to use. That’s often an issue with things designed by engineers, for engineers.

There’s long been discussion of “One ID to Rule Them All,” but that brings in the inevitable (and completely valid) point of who arbitrates/controls the infrastructure for that ID (“and in the Darkness, Binds Them”).

The thing is, folks really want convenience. If it’s not provided as a benevolent resource, an opening is made available to less benevolent people. It’s going to happen, and all the hand-wringing in the world can’t stop human nature.

I feel that public discourse is particularly vulnerable to the medium. Who controls the medium, controls the discourse, and, as we’ve already seen, that can have serious consequences in the real world.

Not a new conundrum. Social Media has simply sprinkled Miracle Gro onto the problem.

I’m not sure there’s any real solution. I am thinking that today’s newer generation (“Alpha”?) is developing a “thick skin,” and maybe, is becoming resistant to people that manipulate communication. I’m fairly despondent about my generation. We seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the shysters.

Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.

the details wrt social media etc were unknown, but the path we were taking was quite clear.

But this got me thinking about what I think a "message" really is. Maybe there's a Dunbar's number kind of thing here because I feel like there's some sort of limit on how many people I can send textual content to before it stops being a "message" and becomes more like an "announcement". Like I get emails, and some of those are messages because they come from individuals and are sent to me and perhaps a small set of other individuals. But some emails are more like announcements (or even "content"), and such quasi-messages have existed since before email went mainsteam (like holiday newsletters that people sent out with xmas cards).

It's true that many social media platforms have a messaging system that exists in parallel ("direct messages"), but that always seemed kind of separate from the core essence of the platform.

The closest you get to real "messages" in social networks is comments, but in my experience the degree to which those constitute "messages" or "communication" varies a lot from platform to platform and also from user to user. These days a large proportion of comments are just slightly more specific "reactions" like "That's so great!" or "Wow" or "Thanks for posting this". I don't often see genuine discussion happening in comments (although HN, if you consider it a social media site, is an exception to this).

There has been an evolution in this regard, but even back in the day I think it wasn't what I'd call "messaging". The earliest platform I can remember using that (in retrospect) I could call a social network was LiveJournal. But LJ was a blogging platform. You didn't post "messages" to other people, you posted, well, posts, and maybe people would comment on them or maybe they wouldn't. I would never have said that I dreamed of LJ becoming "email 2.0". And I'd say modern microblogging-type platforms (like Twitter) seem even more removed from email or "messaging".

I also don't see decentralization as really connected to this. To me the main advantage of decentralization is to eliminate single points of failure and guard against various sorts of rugpulls (like what eventually happened to LJ). But whether a platform fosters communication, messages, interaction, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much independent of whether it's decentralized.

This isn't to say that I disagree that something's been lost in internet communication over the years. But to me that missing thing seems mostly to be a combination of attention and authenticity.

We've lost attention in the sense that now that people do everything with their phones, they consume and create content more diffusely, as opposed to having a division between "I'm sitting at my computer reading or writing" and "I'm doing something else". The small screens and balky input mechanisms of phones make this problem even worse for writing than it is for reading.

And we've lost authenticity in the sense that so many platforms have become contaminated with stuff that is in no sense communication from any human, not even one-way communication. Instead it's junk generated by corporations to sell products (perhaps with some intermediate steps of harvesting data, etc.). This has become much, much worse in the last few years with the rise of AI slop. It's harder and harder to find stuff on the web that actually represents the work of a human being expressing themselves in a personal way.

So yeah, we've lost something, but I wouldn't say we lost communication to entertainment. It's more like we lost the boundaries of the units of our communication so that we find ourselves in a constant blur of content, rather than a sequence of discrete units each of which we process and ponder independently.