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Don't let social media think for you

disgustinglyoptimistic.com

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Re: Don't let social media think for you

#111

Post by Andrex »

bluGill wrote: post #61
wussboy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I had the opposite experience to this. Even though all I ever wanted to know about was what was happening to my friend's kids, my feed was taken over with political and social justice outrage. Outrage sells.

It matters what everyone clicks like on. So you need to be careful there, and also help others be careful. There is way too much political outrage for sure. You just have to wade through it. Hopefully you can join me in spreading the facebook is about family message and get others to stop posting politics. (this is hard, it is so tempting to bait your political friends)

> It matters what everyone clicks like on. So you need to be careful there, and also help others be careful.

The OP's title, "Don't Let Social Media Think for You," applies in this context too. Now you can't even click "Like" without being careful -- to be fair I avoid searching political topics and other sports teams on Google unless I'm incognito.

I feel like we're increasingly trapped in a box by these algorithms and the need to keep them appeased.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#112

Post by Der_Einzige »

coldtea wrote: post #92

It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them". It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked i…

Wish there was a double upvote button for this. Far too often we assume ignorance when malice/sadism is a more correct diagnosis. (reversing the common adage of not attributing to malice what is better attributed to ignorance)

For example, many of my friends don't understand why Americans like to watch biased news. Many think that it's not a concious choice from most Americans. The reality is that most Americans know that they can watch C-SPAN to avoid being lied to - they just don't do it because it's so fking boring. Americans want to be lied to, much as Twitter users want to mob and destroy "bad people"...

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#113

Post by sharken »

beaconstudios wrote: post #101
qsort wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why isn't the mob a top priority? Part of that is the incentives going in the opposite direction, as other commenters have noted. Even assuming they are in good faith, though, I believe it is an extremely difficult problem. Building and maintaining large scale communities is next to impossible, you can't just turn off a switch and make the mob go away, a mob is, by definition, out of control. Historically, we have…

Large-scale community is an oxymoron, and I think the sooner we realise that the better. Communities are built on trust and relationships, what happens at social platforms is that people with "large communities" are just creating followings the same way that celebrities always have, which are a weird modern corruption of the idea of a community (or if you want the academic term for it, a parasocial relationship).

I think of Hacker News as a community, but it's still large enough that you don't really notice who is posting.

What makes a difference to me are the insights you get here combined with thoughtful answers, as in rarely the lowest common denominator type of discussions.

For that there are all too many forgettable social media sites.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#114

Post by jjulius »

coldtea wrote: post #92

It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them". It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked i…

>... and it's not discouraged...

There are a lot of people who have been speaking out against "cancel culture", would that not be a form of trying to discourage social media mobs?

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#115

Post by Der_Einzige »

throwkeep wrote: post #43
Growling_owl wrote: post #16

It's not just social media. Media in general has a heavy bias on negative reporting , that's because humans are wired to have huge spikes in attention when there is a hint of bad news or character assassination. Back in the days it used to be monodirectional stream: from the Newspapers, Radios, TV towards the population. The internet and social media just amped up this phenomenon globally and the person which is the…

Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for challenging the approved narrative on that. It finall…

Idk - I think manufacturing consent may be easier rather than harder these days. The fact that it's now realistic to accuse people of being a bot (GPT-3) means that elites could just deploy large numbers of language models fine tuned and prompted correctly to AstroTurf and manufactur consent "from the ground up".

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#116

Post by beaconstudios »

sharken wrote: post #113
beaconstudios wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large-scale community is an oxymoron, and I think the sooner we realise that the better. Communities are built on trust and relationships, what happens at social platforms is that people with "large communities" are just creating followings the same way that celebrities always have, which are a weird modern corruption of the idea of a community (or if you want the academic term for it, a parasocial relationship).

I think of Hacker News as a community, but it's still large enough that you don't really notice who is posting. What makes a difference to me are the insights you get here combined with thoughtful answers, as in rarely the lowest common denominator type of discussions. For that there are all too many forgettable social media sites.

Hacker News isn't a community in any meaningful sense. I have had interpersonal interactions with maybe half a dozen people from here, all very positive but I don't know these people like I know my neighbours or my friends or even the people who work at the local shop.

Hacker News is a very large and impersonal forum. You can have interesting conversations on a forum, but the degree to which they are a community is the degree to which you develop relationships with the other people. I wouldn't call /r/videos (or any other massive subreddit) a community either, and they have the same level of social intimacy.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#117

Post by qsort »

bckr wrote: post #104
qsort wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why isn't the mob a top priority? Part of that is the incentives going in the opposite direction, as other commenters have noted. Even assuming they are in good faith, though, I believe it is an extremely difficult problem. Building and maintaining large scale communities is next to impossible, you can't just turn off a switch and make the mob go away, a mob is, by definition, out of control. Historically, we have…

> This is, by and large, a good thing. I don't agree that social media (qua social networks) has moved us in the right direction. Web forums and blogs were better. I don't think we need to find the missing piece. I think we need to remove the unnecessary, super profitable poison. Something like private, self hosted forums with universal log in, but no cross-contamination of "likes" and comments, and no algorithmic at…

> Web forums and blogs were better.

I don't think they were inherently better. And don't get me wrong, I have a mostly positive experience with forums and blogs and an extremely negative experience with social networks, eventually I deleted every single account I am not required to have for work-related reasons.

However, I believe the underlying reason is that pre-Facebook communities were more "selective". Being part of those forums or reading blogs was more of a deliberate choice rather than the societal average, something like HN, early Slashdot or early Reddit. This resulted in user bases that were not cross-sections of the general population.

In the alternate universe where forums and blogs became the mainstream, I believe we would have seen the same problems.

Algorithmic feeds are literally evil incarnate and I'd love nothing more than to see them nuked out of existence, but I don't think they are the root of the problem, at least not in this particular case.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#118

Post by sangnoir »

> After a cursory glance, and getting through the heated bluster that often clogs up any twitter debate, I had a general understanding of the situation.

I'm not sure if this was layered meta-commentary or a lack self-awareness. Either way, I chuckled

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#119

Post by Broken_Hippo »

douglaswlance wrote: post #24
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to let you know a bit about the reality you share with others. The stuff on the news is often things that are affecting others directly (do you want to avoid the area of town with unmasked protesters?) and indirectly (Is your neighbor going to increase racism towards Asian Americans in part because of folks linking a virus to a country?). News doesn't always have the most important things to you, but it…

If your goal is to better understand your reality, you would learn more about the world by reading books than by watching the news.

Books don't let you know that genocide is happening at the time, that the bars have been closed yet again, nor that you should probably postpone that trip due to bad weather.

Books might capture the feelings of now: 1984 wasn't making predictions, but illustrated the concerns of the current time. Same for the things in "A Brave new World".

Reading books about the history of cooking isn't going to give you much of a worldview, nor is it going to prepare you for a government restricting your ability to get birth control, abortion, or sterilization surgeries. Books also aren't worth much if you don't reflect on them - but once you do reflect, they aren't realistically all that much better or worse than other artistic mediums and you don't even have to read the books to get advantages (some visual adaptations are good, and there are always audiobooks too).

It isn't to say that you cannot learn from them, but it isn't the same sort of information.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#120

Post by Buldak »

aantix wrote: post #102

I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully denouncing any idea from specific people. E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin I'm unfollowing you".

Before I switched to computer science, I studied philosophy, and I encountered lots of people who seemed to think that philosophers had some kind of special relationship to critical thinking. That makes sense in a way, but I also imagine that adherents to just about any discipline, whether it's mathematics or history or journalism, tell themselves a story like this.
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