Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying • Hacker News Board

Re: Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying

#101

Post by psychomugs » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 12:29 AM UTC

umvi wrote: post #72

endisneigh wrote: post #44

I've thought about this problem a lot - I want to create a social network that has the following attributes: - $1 a year to participate - You must read posts/articles to reply. Imagine the mechanism in which this is determined to be "perfect." - No pictures - Karma is gathered by writing posts that are read a lot, as opposed to comments that have a lot of "upvotes." - Upvotes/downvoting doesn't exist. From my experie…

However you measure something being "read a lot" is basically the same thing as upvotes. People will try to game it to get more readers. Unless you are saying posts will not be sorted by popularity in which case discover-ability of good writing will be a problem (high noise to signal ratio).

YouTube is a good example of players adapting to the game. Since view time became such an important metric, it’s been frustratingly difficult to find straight-to-the-point videos (that aren’t 10-second memes or TikTok reposts). It incentivizes repetition and meandering to stretch 1 minute of content into a 10 minute video.

Re: Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying

#102

Post by goblin89 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 2:21 AM UTC

rland wrote: post #99

goblin89 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think texts/video calls/etc. isn't social media, it's much more like conversation. > That's why people (in general) are not nearly as mean or rude on a voice call or a 1-to-1 text chat. This doesn’t have to do with social media per se and is inherent to group dynamics. People are more rude as a rule in many-to-many conversations: where there is a group, there always lurks contention for status. Bullying is the mo…

Yes, I think you're right. It's useful to have the unique label of "social media" because the scale you mention can't really be replicated offline. A difference in quantity is a difference in kind in this case.

I’ll rephrase.

Here’s the part I disagree with:

> seeing a person's body and face forces you to acknowledge their internal life, because the shared physical experience forces it. That's why it's a much higher barrier to bully or be bullied in the physical world.

No, it’s not about seeing a person’s body and face forcing you to acknowledge their internal life. Pathological cases aside, we are fundamentally human and we perfectly understand that we are communicating with a human online as well as offline.

It’s about the group. Is there a watching group? Cue contention for status, in worst cases culminating in bullying. No group? Former bully can be nice to the victim, because suddenly there is no winning of status, and having a cooperating entity is practical.

The barrier to being bullied in the physical world is not shared physical experience. The barrier is the potential of a higher-status person taking the side of the bullied. Absent that potential (e.g., classroom without a teacher), bullying flourishes. Shared physical experience means nothing to the bully.

Here’re some aspects particular to bullying online:

— Unlike real world, bullying online can happen in 1:1 chats, because the bully can be accompanied by people IRL and can be gaining status in their eyes, unbeknownst to the victim.

— In public social media, the bully has to account for the potential of a higher-status person coming out of the blue and causing a separate crowd to take the side of the bully, which can be harder to predict compared to my classroom example. This makes public bullying a bit higher-stakes, especially if real identity is associated with the account; which somewhat balances out the scale.

Re: Social media addiction linked to cyberbullying

#103

Post by TheJoYo » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #12

TheJoYo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using a chronological order social media for a couple of years now and I wouldn't trade it for a sorting algo. Sure, I miss some things that are likely interesting and sometimes I need to mute some that post too often. I think content tagging is what people were really asking for when they got "optimized for engagement."

Is there a mainstream social media platform that still supports a chronological order? Twitter is the closest one but as far as I know they still periodically reset the feed to the algorithmic one, overriding your previous decision.

https://joinmastodon.org has 500k active users this month, 1 mil the last 6 months.