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The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

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Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#11

Post by nottorp »

pjc50 wrote: post #9

> "Political content is pushing users toward the exit" The culture war is exhausting. The idealist dream of some sort of Athenian public deliberation has been overwritten by ragebait. It's both very effective at meeting social media goals (getting people to spend too much time online arguing with strangers), and political goals (Project 2025; the Hungarian/Russian/American conserviative project CPAC; whatever it is t…

My facebook seems to have trained itself to never give me "political content".

Still, I open it about once per week to check for events at my favorite saturday evening hang outs, look at some cat photos and close it.

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#12

Post by gnoll_of_gozag »

TomMasz wrote: post #6

Social media isn't "social" anymore. It's algorithmically designed to keep you scrolling. Burnout is inevitable.

big normie social media yes, but people still have hella actual conversations on bluesky and mastodon and (i think) they use chronological fields by default

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#15

Post by rob-lag »

bunderbunder wrote: post #8
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #3

Social media not adequatly defined in this article. It's hysteria, a buzzword. The article is just noise without specifying what they're talking about

In 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?

What's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at.

There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok)

Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#16

Post by bcjdjsndon »

bunderbunder wrote: post #8
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #3

Social media not adequatly defined in this article. It's hysteria, a buzzword. The article is just noise without specifying what they're talking about

In 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?

Some people fear paedos talking to kids, others fear kids watching bad videos or reading bad comments. They are two vastly different complaints.

One is about communications, the other is a more general concern about content that could extend to and audiovisual form.

Yet another definition is essentially a synonym for tiktok. Or sometimes they mean just twitter.

The UK online safety act leans heavily towards communication (ie comments or DMs, hence Wikipedia being caught up in it)

> assume the common meaning?

Which is? Point me to a defintion

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#17

Post by bcjdjsndon »

rob-lag wrote: post #15
bunderbunder wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?

What's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at. There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok) Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.

Exactly

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#18

Post by high_na_euv »

callmeal wrote: post #10
daveydave wrote: post #7

I hope we can reach a point where there's enough research on the negative effects of social media (or more specifically which features of it e.g. scrolling videos) that we can inform people from a young age.

There is more than enough research. https://thehighwire.com/news/metas-internal-research-proves-... But nothing's going to change as long as we continue pretending that billionaires hoarding pieces of "special" paper (or numbers in a bank account) are less mentally ill than people hoarding pieces of regular paper (or other things).

>But nothing's going to change as long as we continue pretending that billionaires hoarding pieces of "special" paper (or numbers in a bank account) are less mentally ill than people hoarding pieces of regular paper (or other things).

Wut

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#19

Post by alistairSH »

rob-lag wrote: post #15
bunderbunder wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?

What's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at. There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok) Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.

Even HN has a clout score, and seeing it move up/down, or slapping that up/down arrow, can trigger the same dopamine as social media by MegaCorp.

Re: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

#20

Post by close04 »

alistairSH wrote: post #19
rob-lag wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at. There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok) Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.

Even HN has a clout score, and seeing it move up/down, or slapping that up/down arrow, can trigger the same dopamine as social media by MegaCorp.

And the content discovery algorithm is tuned to please the masses, the users drive the algorithm which promotes or buries the content for everyone else. I think the moment you use a socially driven algorithm to show/hide content from users is when you're planted firmly in social media territory.
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