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Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

arstechnica.com

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Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#31

Post by PaulHoule »

Mouvelie wrote: post #28
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

I work in survey research and I'm rather appalled at how many people would rather survey a sample of AIs than a sample of people and claim they can come to some valid conclusion as a result. There are many ways AIs differ from real people and any conclusions you can draw from them are limited at best -- we've had enough bad experiments done with real people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Int…

Genuine question : are you scared for your job ? I see this tendency to use "synthetic personas" growing and frankly, having to explain why this sucks is insulting in itself. Decision makers are just not interested in having this kind of thought argument.

Not really. Sales is doing better than it ever has since I’ve been here. For one thing, AI folks want our data. Despite challenges in the industry, public opinion is more relevant than ever and the areas where we are really unsurpassed is (1) historical data and (2) the most usable web site, the latter one I am a part of.

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#32

Post by mvieira38 »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #21
farceSpherule wrote: post #12

Social media is the new smoking... Widespread adoption before understanding risks - embraced globally before fully grasping the mental health, social, and political consequences, especially for young people. Delayed but significant harm - can lead to gradual impacts like reduced attention span, increased anxiety, depression, loneliness, and polarization Corporate incentives misaligned with public health - media compa…

Not an accurate analogy in my opinion, but close. - Smoking feels good but doesn't provide any useful function. - Some social media use feels good and doesn't provide any useful function, but social media is extremely useful to cheaply keep in touch with friends and family and extremely useful for discovering and coordinating events. Fortunately the "keep in touch" part can be done with apps that don't have so much o…

I think most of the social media power users don't connect with friends and family at all through the platforms. Young Gen Zers just scroll Tiktok (or whatever clone they prefer) and share the ones they like through snapchat/discord/telegram/messenger/sms/whatsapp. Some will post stuff for their friends to see through "close friends" or whatever, but it's much less personal than it once was with Facebook groups and whatnot

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#33

Post by MeIam »

The main reason that it can't be fixed is that it has political or corporate operators and propaganda bots have taken over. There is always an agenda running through threads of social media even for mundane topics that seeking supremacy.

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#34

Post by mvieira38 »

farceSpherule wrote: post #12

Social media is the new smoking... Widespread adoption before understanding risks - embraced globally before fully grasping the mental health, social, and political consequences, especially for young people. Delayed but significant harm - can lead to gradual impacts like reduced attention span, increased anxiety, depression, loneliness, and polarization Corporate incentives misaligned with public health - media compa…

This analogy undersells the negative impact of social media. Smoking wasn't a propaganda machine at the hands of a few faceless corpos with no clear affiliation, for example, nor did it form a global spynet

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#35

Post by Mouvelie »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #25
KaiserPro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage Kinda, but they also don't really realise that they have much more control over the feed than they expect (in certain areas) For the reel/tiktok/foryou-instagram feeds, it shows you subjects that you engage with. It will a/b other subjects that similar people engage with. Thats all its doing. continual a/b to see if you like what ever flavour of bullshit is popular.…

There's definitely a mass of people who can't/won't/don't get past passive/least-effort relationships with things on screens. These would be the type that in the TV days would simply leave the TV on a specific channel all day and just watch whatever was on, and probably haven't changed their car radio dial from the station they set it to when they bought the car. In modern times they probably have their cable TV they…

Yup. Knowing the exact percentage of those people would be hurtful to my soul I think, but I suspect they drive a meaningful percentage of business. Like that time when Netflix displayed shows on, because some people couldn't be bothered to actually choose something to watch ?

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#36

Post by PaulHoule »

duxup wrote: post #2

A lot of talk goes into how Facebook or other social media use algorithms to encourage engagement, that often includes outrage type content, fake news, rabbit holes and so on. But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage with that, and users even produce that content for social media platforms for free. It's hard to escape that part. I remember trying Bluesky and while I liked it better than Twitter, for me it wa…

Personally I really enjoy Mastodon and Bluesky but I am very deliberate at avoiding negative people, I do not follow and often mute or block “diss abled” people who complain about everything or people who think I make their life awful because I am cisgender or who post 10 articles an hour about political outrage. The discover page on Bluesky is algorithmic and respects the “less like this” button and last time I looked has 75% less outrage than the following page. (A dislike button that works is a human right in social media!)

Once I get my database library reworked, a project I have in the queue is a classifier which filters out negative people so I can speed follow and not add a bunch of negativity to my feed, this way I get to enjoy real gems like

https://mas.to/@skeletor

Cross posting that would cure some of the ills of LinkedIn!

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#37

Post by RiverCrochet »

mvieira38 wrote: post #32
RiverCrochet wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an accurate analogy in my opinion, but close. - Smoking feels good but doesn't provide any useful function. - Some social media use feels good and doesn't provide any useful function, but social media is extremely useful to cheaply keep in touch with friends and family and extremely useful for discovering and coordinating events. Fortunately the "keep in touch" part can be done with apps that don't have so much o…

I think most of the social media power users don't connect with friends and family at all through the platforms. Young Gen Zers just scroll Tiktok (or whatever clone they prefer) and share the ones they like through snapchat/discord/telegram/messenger/sms/whatsapp. Some will post stuff for their friends to see through "close friends" or whatever, but it's much less personal than it once was with Facebook groups and w…

Agreed. And it's not necessary when you have so many apps. They're using Tiktok for scrolling and Discord when they actually want to chat with their friends.

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#39

Post by richardubright »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3

I work in survey research and I'm rather appalled at how many people would rather survey a sample of AIs than a sample of people and claim they can come to some valid conclusion as a result. There are many ways AIs differ from real people and any conclusions you can draw from them are limited at best -- we've had enough bad experiments done with real people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Int…

Wait what? Is there an article on this. That sounds absolutely insane.

Re: Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

#40

Post by PaulHoule »

reactordev wrote: post #14
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

I work in survey research and I'm rather appalled at how many people would rather survey a sample of AIs than a sample of people and claim they can come to some valid conclusion as a result. There are many ways AIs differ from real people and any conclusions you can draw from them are limited at best -- we've had enough bad experiments done with real people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Int…

I trust your judgement more than Ars Technica. For us layman, the flaw of using AI trained on people for surveys is, human. Humans have a unique tendency to be spontaneous, wouldn’t you say? How would a focus group research team approach this when they’re bombarded by AI solutions that want their research funds?

The worst problems with people these days seem to be they don’t pick up the phone. Probability-based polls are still pretty good about most things unless they involve Donald Trump —- it seems some Trump supporters either don’t pick up the phone or lie to pollsters. Some polls correct for this with aggressive weighting but how scientific it really is is up in the air.
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