Best of Social Media — September 2025

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   The Register·29w

   Australia asks GitHub if it's a dangerous social network

   Australia's eSafety Commissioner is investigating whether GitHub qualifies as a social network under new legislation that will ban under-16s from certain social media platforms starting December 10th. While GitHub's primary purpose isn't social interaction, it does allow comments, user interactions, and content hosting through features like GitHub Pages, potentially making it subject to the new restrictions. The legislation requires platforms to self-assess against specific criteria including enabling social interaction, allowing user linking, and hosting user-generated content.

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   Article

   Hacker News·31w

   The Last Days Of Social Media

   Social media platforms are increasingly flooded with AI-generated spam, bot accounts, and synthetic content that drowns out genuine human interaction. Engagement rates are plummeting as users grow exhausted with endless feeds of meaningless content optimized for clicks rather than connection. The traditional social media model is fragmenting as people migrate to smaller, private communities like Discord servers, group chats, and federated platforms. The future points toward decentralized, publicly governed digital spaces with transparent algorithms, user choice in content curation, and design patterns that prioritize intention over compulsive scrolling.

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   Article

   Hacker News·31w

   TikTok Won. Now Everything Is 60 Seconds.

   TikTok has fundamentally transformed digital culture by industrializing human attention through sophisticated algorithmic optimization. The platform's instant learning from micro-behaviors creates an uncannily perceptive recommendation system that other platforms are now copying. This shift is reshaping everything from news delivery to entertainment, education, and cultural consumption, turning content creation into hyper-specialized niches optimized for algorithmic engagement. While providing immediate satisfaction and personalized content, this model trades away sustained attention, serendipitous discovery, and the ability to engage with complex ideas that don't offer instant rewards.

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   Article

   Hacker News·29w

   I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

   An iOS developer experiments with spending a full week focused on marketing and social media promotion instead of coding new features for their fitness app. The week involved creating Instagram content, cold messaging studios and trainers, and meeting with fitness industry influencers. Key insights include the surprising difficulty of content creation, the effectiveness of direct outreach, and how marketing opens doors that code alone cannot.

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   Article

   Overreacted·29w

   Open Social — overreacted

   Explores the concept of "open social" through the AT Protocol, drawing parallels between how open source transformed software development and how decentralized social networks could transform social media. The protocol enables users to own their social data in personal repositories while still enabling aggregation features like feeds and notifications. Users can migrate between platforms without losing their social graph, and applications can interoperate by sharing data formats. This approach aims to solve the vendor lock-in problem of current social media platforms where user data becomes trapped in proprietary databases.

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   Article

   Hacker News·31w

   We traded blogs for black boxes, now we're paying for it

   Algorithmic feeds and centralized platforms have destroyed the human-driven discovery that made the early internet special. Context collapse occurs when algorithms mix unrelated audiences, leading to negative discourse and the spread of harmful content like incel terminology. The solution involves using RSS readers, federated social media, open source software, and curating your own information sources instead of relying on black-box algorithms controlled by tech companies.

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