221–230 of 283 posts
The reality is that a lot of people don't have the wherewithal to "fix their unpleasant reality". Hence drugs and alcohol, daytime TV, and various other kinds of destructive escapes from reality exist. Social media is just the latest one.
I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation. My vote for what's mor…
I don't think it's the upvote/downvote system itself, but the fact that you can see your own "score" that changes behaviour.
It has definitely made me more likely to comment, even when I don't have much to add, and I've noticed my comments getting more and more inflammatory/polarising over the past few months as I start to optimise for engagement.
Before I turned on noprocrast, I'd often sit there "babysitting" my comments; checking on them every 10 minutes to see how people have reacted to it.
I'd be interested to see if @dang has found similar negative effects associated with giving precise counts and scores.
I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation. My vote for what's mor…
>>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and what generally causes the social harm The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest problem with social media Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors choosing to upvote,…
Upvotes can lead to karma farming, and the need to see that number of likes go up can be a problem I admit. I just think the echo chamber effect is a worse problem. We've all dealt with fragile egos and boisterous idiots before.
I miss the days where you weren't shunned for wrong-think, just argued with constantly if your opinion differed from the norm.
If social media or anything else is causing more harm than good, I say stop doing it. Even if quitting is hard. Don’t invest more into something than you get out of it, is something I firmly support. I have essentially stopped using Facebook because of that, but I recognize that for many people, quitting Facebook would have a negative impact on their life because they get more out of it than they put into it.
Still, I can’t get behind the whole “you should quit becusss x, y, z” thing. Like, as much as I like to rip on social media (especially Twitter), my life has been changed and enhanced and is demonstrably and unquestionably better because of social media. I realize that isn’t the case for everyone, but for me, it is. I use what has a positive impact on my life and don’t use what doesn’t, the same as with anything else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably a walled city is the only way to achieve that. Such a setup is like a closed mailing list in which all participants have to pass an 'entrance exam' of some kind. This kind of setup imposes a cost for rude, nasty, aggressive and destructive behavior - since you can simply be excluded from the group in that case. This is how most of the world works on a day to day basis; you don't let random people into a corp…
Facebook already has all that with groups. I think the issue is something more fundamental with humans.
> After the habit of scrolling and liking wears off, you suddenly find yourself in a joyful place. A quieter, calmer, less demanding place where you don’t want to know what others are doing. You focus on what you want to do. But what if you don't know what you want to do? I feel like this post was written from the perspective of someone who already has their own life goals sorted out, and social media was clearly act…
You won't find yourself by seeking distraction. You need to eliminate distractions and feel the pain of boredom, which will motivate you to try things.
I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation. My vote for what's mor…
The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.) Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes. [0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.) Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes. [0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
> The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.) > Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than feeds generally? I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in there if I don't actually put it there. My Facebook and Twitter feeds however ar…