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Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

bbc.com

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Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#411

Post by Anthony-G »

malfist wrote: post #28
everdrive wrote: post #3

Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims. Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with…

Your theory about cable television is fascinating. I never really watched TV growing up, but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Social media is totally that today too. I quit facebook in 2016 and reddit in 2023 over similar fears.…

I used to only rarely look at Youtube (repairs, cooking, the odd live concert) but since I started looking at it more often (for guitar and piano tutorials), I’ve found its UI to be too distracting. I added the following custom uBlock filters to make it less annoying:

    ! Remove the "Up next" sidebar (the #secondary container) so that the main content area (#primary) takes up the full width.
    youtube.com##ytd-watch-flexy #secondary:remove()

    ! Ensure the video takes up the full width when playing full screen.
    youtube.com###panels-full-bleed-container:remove()

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#412

Post by squidsoup »

twodave wrote: post #160

Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.

Capitalism subsumes all culture, even counter culture, destroys its essence and commodifies it.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#413

Post by Anthony-G »

dredmorbius wrote: post #392
chasd00 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but every time I visit my parents now that they're retired, one of them always has a 24 hour news going and it's just non stop "you should be afraid" and "you should be angry" told to you by pretty faces smiling the whole time. Don Henley wrote a song about that kind of news: "We got the bubble headed bleached blonde Comes on at five She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye It's interesting wh…

Great song. And long before that, Yellow Journalism: Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five characteristics to identify yellow journalism: 1. scare headlines in huge print, often sensationalizing minor news 2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings 3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts 4. emphasis on full-color Sunday su…

Upvoted your comment but my inner pedant can’t help but point out that’s more an example of whitewashing rather than greenwashing (which itself is a derivative of whitewashing).

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#414

Post by aaron695 »

Aurornis wrote: post #240

This article has struck a nerve in the comment section. It's describing how traditional social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are not used for social features anymore, but for content discovery. The descriptions of how people are using Facebook to find new content anonymously are not that different from how we use Hacker News, which has reignited the debate about whether Hacker News is social media. I had to…

[dead]

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#415

Post by anitil »

kachurovskiy wrote: post #389

I've stopped using YouTube and Reddit since early April and it's been a mixed bag. On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or updating the garden playground. On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking information…

I've effectively dropped reddit because they've made the mobile web version near-unusable (and I find old.reddit.com difficult on mobile). Honestly, it's an improvement in my life. I don't know how I found myself spending so much time on it for so little benefit

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#417

Post by [deleted] »

everdrive wrote: post #3

Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims. Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with…

[deleted]

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#418

Post by airstrike »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #405
airstrike wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN and Facebook are entirely different beasts. I have no idea who you are, stickfigure. I can't remember usernames from HN, I can't follow people, I can't curate my feed not every user submitted feed with upvotes is the same

You can literally go to a users profile and bookmark it. You are following them. You cannot curate your feed on Facebook. You used to, sure. Now it's just whatever they give you.

I am not following them in the social media sense if I don't get a feed of their activities. I can also bookmark people on X, and yet, there's a different "Follow" functionality. They are not the same thing.

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#419

Post by switchbak »

zerobees wrote: post #197
saadn92 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on. We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day. And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a…

They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere near the things.

That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.

I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?

Re: Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds

#420

Post by switchbak »

kachurovskiy wrote: post #389

I've stopped using YouTube and Reddit since early April and it's been a mixed bag. On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or updating the garden playground. On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking information…

You must have one high-tech kitchen!
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