Did social media made people unable to properly chat?
Did social media made people unable to properly chat?
You find someone interesting on Instagram (or Tinder/happn/Bumble if they left their IG handle there), though their profile is restricted. You add that person, which accepts you, sometimes after two or three months. You leave a private message to that person, thanking it for accepting you as a follower, and asking if it wants to talk. Then, silence. Or worse yet, exchanges a few phrases and then ghosts you out of nowhere, without explanation or if you didn't said anything rude.
I mean, no one owes anyone anything in a situation like that, of course, but why bother opening a pathway in the first place, instead of just refusing? And if you find that other not really interesting after some conversation, though not really creepy or weird or over-the-top, why not be polite and say "look, this is not going to work, I don't want to talk to you anymore" or "this thing you said is a red flag for me, bye, take care"?
What bothers me is like, don't we talk anymore like normal people are supposed to? Have personal connections become so disposable like that? Or am I just freaking out and perhaps just need to find out somewhere in the real world where I could bond more easily with real people?
One thing I think about is the incredible poverty of text.
When you look at a word you get a meaning. But that meaning, it comes mostly from your entire life's experience, your memory, what you've been taught. That's huge. And the word is very very small, comparatively.
So when you're reading, 99% of the content is coming from you. So reading is basically you just talking to yourself. And social media is a million people talking to themselves.
And that's pretty weird.
Great point. Didn't thought from the point of view of linguistics.
It might set a certain mood. You feast upon the global conversational banquet, yet you still feel hungry.
Any form of site where people can communicate, be it, lemmy , Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc is creating a problem of people going that sort of thing
why bother opening a pathway in the first place
i've never had an IG account myself, but i think your mistake is in assuming that someone accepting your follow request on a restricted IG account is an indicator of desire for chatting with strangers. accepting your follow request might just mean they glanced at your profile and assessed that you aren't a spammer or bot, not that they want to chat with you.
perhaps just need to find out somewhere in the real world where I could bond more easily with real people?
for sure that is a good idea 😂
but there are also many places online where it is much more reasonable to assume people are interested in chatting with strangers.
Perhaps social media has had an impact, but IMO the larger issue at hand is that people (especially in the US) have both less time and fewer places to have casual conversations. People are working more across the board and have more distractions and things vying for their attention (mostly because of the internet and social media, ofc), so even when a situation appears, there is a higher cost to interact, whether that's in real life or on the internet.
Fwiw, direct messages can be a swamp of nonsense, especially for people who post a lot publicly on social media platforms. They may not be intentionally ignoring you, but you get lost in the mess. Women especially get harassed via DM on basically every platform so there is a tendency to ignore DM functionality. Platforms that are already set up to facilitate random chats like forums, discord, etc are going to be way better for having a real conversation that could even become a friendship
What you're doing sounds like a lot of spam that I've been receiving.
Have you tried Discord? I've met a ton of people on Discord servers or in games that have a focus on Discord, and we talk at length on a regular basis, both in text and in voice. Hell, sometimes I'll sit in a voice chat with them and talk about nothing in particular all day or literally just sleep in digital proximity.
Instagram or any social media with DMs is probably shit for chat because it's literally not intended as a chat client. That's a function that's tacked on as an afterthought and usually pretty poorly.
Something like Discord, Element, or IRC is probably a way better bet. It's the same as trying to hold a conversation over email or Livejournal in the late 90s or early 00s rather than using an AIM, ICQ, YIM, or MSN client. Or like, IRC or even Palace or just some small web-based Java chat. You're just kind of doing it wrong, I think.
That's because those are Branding places. They're places to sell your Brand. It's why business profiles are interchangeable with personal profiles, it's about branding.
Branding isn't just for corporate products anymore, it's for everyone, apparently.
It's the whole "influencer's real lives are a lot less glamorous than their Insta leads you to believe," which is totally true, most of the clothes are rented and they get to stay maybe 24 hours in a nice place just for a photo shoot, then they're sent back to their crappy apartment.
Asmongold is a gross dumb piece of shit but openly living in filth is at least being honest about how most of these influencers actually live.
It's all smoke and mirrors for branding. Real people with real lives don't spend their time managing their "brand" anywhere, whether it's Instagram or LinkedIn because, by definition, we have real lives and real connections with real people already.
I don't watch asmongold, but my GF does. I don't think he's perfect, but I also don't think he's dumb, it's actually quite refreshing to see someone who says what they think even if they know it might be an unpopular opinion, we live in an age where people are scared to offend and we end up with a load of boring fence sitters.
He is gross tho, I'd watch the shit out of a Asmongold spring cleaning stream.
i struggle to call those social media... they arent very social at all. theyre all just people yelling into the cloud. its already mostly a one-way event.
forums like lemmy/reddit.. discourse channels like IRC are true bidirectional social systems.
youre just using the wrong tools