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Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

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Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#51

Post by vlunkr »

dylan604 wrote: post #14
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to s…

>When I put it that way it feels banal, It is banal, at least the largest portion of social media is. Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc. All sounds useful, but then FB turned it creepy with their method of monetizing their products and algos to pull the strings to make it as addicting as possible. Insta, TikTok, etc has pretty much fully embra…

I don't know if it's just nostalgia talking, but I feel like a decade ago Facebook really was good at connecting people. I enjoyed it, because most of the content was real people you knew having conversations, or sharing pictures they had taken. I eventually left because it was honestly just boring. My timeline was nothing but shared posts from big content pages, which of course became mostly bad politics over time.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#52

Post by FabiansSuck111 »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #16
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to s…

This strongly reminds me of Kornhauser’s three levels of social relations ( Politics of Mass Society , 1959): > We can conceive of all but the simplest societies as comprising three levels of social relations. The first level consists of highly personal or primary relations, notably the family. The third level contains relations inclusive of the whole population, notably the state. The second level comprises all inte…

You can reduce all of this to the simple observation that:

There are little consequences when the pool of people you have access to is massive; and there remains no reason to become emotionally invested in a certain "core" of people, when you can easily jump to another if that "core" is not perfect.

This leads to a feedback loop that stunts relationship "depth."

Or further: when you have options, the default modus operandi is to not become completely invested into any single one -- you can always "jump" to another, and are always on the lookout for "greener pastures."

People have more options than they used to.

As much as I craved these "second level" (and even "first level") social relations, over the years I've become assimilated and contribute to the aforementioned feedback loop.

The "ills" of modern life have been exponentially increasing, but for the future generations they are simply "life."

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#55

Post by [deleted] »

3np wrote: post #3

Somehow this post takes the least interesting part of the source article[0] and draws false conclusions from it. > In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. > It turns out that message propagation follows a power law: the probability of a meme being shared a given number of times is roughly propor…

[deleted]

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#56

Post by rg111 »

As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process.

I avoid this by unfollowing people very frequently. I see one stupid candid or a pout or a food shot, I just unfollow that person.

Same goes for SJW/White Supremacy types. Whether you are OP or a sharer, you get muted/unfollowed.

This is how I use Quora. When I used Facebook five years ago, I used it this way.

Twitter I use only for professional content. Very strictly. I also set the trending country to Namibia, so that I don't even know what they are talking about.

I am less and less active on social media with the passing of days, but a good social media experience can be achieved by strictly filtering normies, politics, food porn, etc.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#57

Post by RNCTX »

Perhaps we really are in the (clickbait) matrix.

An blog post about a pointless research project aimed at drawing a conclusion that could be drawn from common sense without any research at all.

All of which is a somewhat circular exercise in bad content announcing itself to the world in an ontological sense.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#58

Post by rg111 »

dylan604 wrote: post #14
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to s…

>When I put it that way it feels banal, It is banal, at least the largest portion of social media is. Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc. All sounds useful, but then FB turned it creepy with their method of monetizing their products and algos to pull the strings to make it as addicting as possible. Insta, TikTok, etc has pretty much fully embra…

> I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc.

When I used FB, I used it as a non-professional LinkedIn. Like, networking, but for people outside of your professional network.

Being connected to people who are not so close that you shared your cell number, but still wanted to stay connected.

(Email isn't big where I live)

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#59

Post by dbtc »

rg111 wrote: post #56

As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process. I avoid this by unfollowing people very frequently. I see one stupid candid or a pout or a food shot, I just unfollow that person. Same goes for SJW/White Supremacy types. Whether you are OP or a sharer, you get mut…

I just use good old bookmarks for specific accounts on youtube and twitter.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#60

Post by crdrost »

stavros wrote: post #12
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to s…

Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.

Thanks! Fixed.
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