I often wonder when I see articles like this if HN counts as social media. And then, the continuous re-discovery or the ails of social media on social media is a trip, in itself.
Technically, yes, but at least it's not filter bubbling everyone.
The case against social media is stronger than you think
181–190 of 304 posts
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#182I think the biggest problem in arguing against tech and social media is that it in truth you rely on counterfactual positions, which describe how the world would look without that thing.
A world without online dating for instance wouldn't just be the same as now, except without those apps. Now forms of socializing would emerge, which you could argue are more local and healthier for society.
When talking about social media, I now ignore the more powerful arguments of how better the world could be without people spending hours on their smartphones, and focus on the problem that it's a surogate for socialization where everyone wants to sell you something, which most people seem to agree is wrong.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#183I think to be clear that’s “The case against algorithmic*” social media”, the kind that uses engagement as a core driver.
I recently learned that Tiktok has a thing called "Streak Pets". Imagine taking a dopamine addiction-inducing activity and imagine gamifying that to maximize engagement in that activity. Imagine the brainstorming sessions at Tiktok where they navigate around the glaring issue of the fried brain circuitry of their own users.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it doesn't help a bit. I would replace "it doesn't help a bit" with "it doesn't solve the problem". My casual browsing experience is that X is much more intense / extreme than Facebook. Of course, the bigger problem is the algorithm - if the extreme is always pushed to the top, then it doesn't matter if it's 1% or 0.001% - the a big enough pool, you only see extremes.
I bet if we didn't tolerate advertising and were instead optimising for what the user wanted we'd come up with something much more palatable.
A lot of this is driven by the user's behavior, not just advertising, though.
"The algorithm" is going to give you more of what you engage with, and when it comes to sponsored content, it's going to give you the sponsored content you're most likely to engage with too.
I'd argue that, while advertising has probably increased the number of people posting stuff online explicitly designed to try and generate revenue for themselves, that type of content's been around since much earlier.
Heck, look at Reddit or 4chan: they're not sharing revenue with users and I'd say they're at least not without their own content problems.
I'm not sure there's a convincing gap between what users "want" and what they actually engage with organically.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#185Social media would be entirely different if there were no monetization on political content. There's a whole lot of ragebaiting/engagement-farming for views. I don't know how to filter for political content, but it's worth a shot. People are free to say whatever they want, but they don't need to get paid for it.
Strangely I never see political content on YouTube. Maybe the algorithm worked out quickly I'm simply not interested. Whereas twitter/mastodon/bluesky are awash in it, to the point of making those platforms pretty unusable for me. I guess the difference is that YouTube content creators don't casually drop politics in because it will alienate half their audience and lose revenue. Whereas on those other platforms the p…
Youtube is the one platform that actually tunes "the algorithm" in a responsible way.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#186I really hate the narrative that social media has increased polarization knowing that my still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south where they were literally separated from society because of the color of their skin. The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
Race relations were better in the 2000-2010 period, according to Gallup data:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
Easy to cherry-pick stuff. You can cherry-pick Jim Crow south; I can cherry-pick Chicago in the 90s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmAI67nBGU
I think we have to get past black-and-white thinking and see it as a matter of degree. With 340 million people in the USA, realistically, at least a few of them will always be racist. The question is how powerful and influential the racists are. That's a question which social media feeds into.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#187Designing tools is designing behavior. It shouldn't be surprising that the behavior of a society changes when the primary form of discourse shifts from communication among peers to maximizing the engagement of strangers due to the financial needs of the platform.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#188I started using X a few weeks ago and I’m already seeing it impact my mind negatively. It is pure controlled and distilled propaganda that’s clearly made to intentionally shape how we think, across the different skinner boxes that is each different social media platform. I’ll be deleting my account.
Reddit is by far the worst though since everything is clearly botted yet people pretend it’s organic leading to a kind of false sense of security that what you see is curated and willed by the “people”.
It’s far more than “engagement” and the “algorithm” - it’s beyond that It’s all blatantly manufactured as some Aquino-esque psyop.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#189Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack. A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation. There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be hi…
> Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack. It's litigated all over and has been for a decade. Australia for example has set an age limit of 16 to have social media. France 15. Schools or countries are trying various phone bans. There's research into it. There are whistleblowers telling about Facebook's own research they've suppressed as it woul…
You’re strengthening OP’s point instead of undermining it.
The “some governments banned it for kids” argument is an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy.
The actions of tech-reactionist leftist governments absolutely do not constitute sound science or evidence in this matter.
And if you’re claiming the French government only makes government policy based on sound data, I will point you to their currently unraveling government over the mathematically impossible social pension scheme they’ve created.
Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think
#190The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.” I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.
Nice bloody try, guv, I mean "blitz_skull".
Tell me now will ya, who will effect "the real weight of social consequence" over anonymous 1-to-1M connections, other than other humans, the same kind that by your premise are not "capable of responsibly wielding [...] power" over such things?
(Or are there multiple kinds? Eh?)
Would "the real weight of social consequence" work the way you want it to when embodied by a commission? When codified by law? In the form a bot? As crowd? A corp? Me? Nah, you of course.
It's ever telling how the legitimacy of millions of strangers being able to decide the fate of any one individual is hardly ever called into question - only ever the ability of one to talk back.