Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying

My opinions not so much on the study itself, but the topic of general shitty behaviour people seem to display on popular social media platforms.

Personally, I think it has less to do with things like anonymity, up/downvotes and other gamey systems employed that tend to get blamed and more to do with the communities themselves.

Specifically, their size. But also, the willingness of moderators to enforce a few basic rules of civility.

I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes cities on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and communities. I realize there's exceptions, but speaking generally this tends to be the case.

To further the comparison a bit, you're also more likely to have the police respond with favourable results to personal and petty crime in smaller towns.

You can see the same things in smaller internet communities. Whether they're pseudonymous or not or whatever kinds of upvoting systems they have or not, there's less people, moderators tend to respond more quickly to personal attacks and things and usually in more reasonable ways than automated algorithms.

Again, generalizing, but when communities are small enough all the people participating are recognizable and when moderators are active in enforcing those basic rules of conduct, people tend to behave a little more reasonably.

As a sidenote, I'll throw HN in as an exception to the size thing, because it's a pretty large community, but dang and the mods are like super human or something so manage to keep the conversation pretty civil most of the time here.

> Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours.

It's not that simple though. You're likely to be part of a broader community and simply deciding to leave that community, and all of your friends, over the actions of one person, is not very reasonable. Often times we are forced to be around people we don't particularly like. When that person does something valuable, they get a level of protection from being reprimanded for their bad behavior that isn't afforded to outsiders of the group, so kicking out such people often becomes difficult as well.

There's a lot of nuance, but my rule of thumb isn't so far off from the comment's above you.

My Twitter avatar is a picture of a fractal I generated with my own software. That reveals (fuzzily) a certain non-obvious aspect of my personality, which you couldn't get just from looking at my face. The majority of people have faces; mine isn't much of a signal to strangers.

Faces are for recognition. If we met at a conference, you could recognize me again by my face. If you don't know me, my face isn't very useful unless you expect to meet me in person. So, a face on Twitter is unhelpful to the point of being counterproductive.

Anyway, that face might not even be theirs.

Additionally, how would reading be measured?

As soon as it appeared, when I was like 16 and an adept of philosophy, classic theater and general litterature which were, with video games, big escapes at the time, we were all talking around me about this network of people looking at themselves yelling in the void.

A few years pass by and everyone is addicted to facebook for news so much that my parents became fascists, my sister went through communist then populism and now post stuff like the EU is going to steal our savings, my friends are either gone off of it or completely vain selfying their vacation to no one in particular.

And now I post yet another comment to myself, marvelling at my english and smiling at my little twist. You're right, we don't talk to each other at all we just show our best angle to ourselves while raging jealously at other people's better angles.