And yes, I’m aware of the irony of posting this on social media, but I truly think that it is an awful thing that has happened humanity.
And to be absolutely clear, I do acknowledge that there are benefits: it allows people who are distant to remain in touch, for example. Or it can be used to put out critical information (think COVID-19 for example).
But let’s face it — there’s another face to it also, one that brings out the worst of humanity. How far do you have to scroll on any platform before you find toxicity? Divisive, inflammatory comments that bring out the absolute worst in us. All because people have different opinions on any topic (the problem of course is not in people having different opinions, but in giving the masses the means to express their differing opinions is really what leads to too many civilised conversations descending into barbaric insults and word slinging. Try as hard as you like to disengage, friction will always produce heat.)
Moreover, how much misinformation has been spread on social media platforms over the years? I don’t think I need to say much more about that.
And to be clear: I’m not saying these issues and others are exclusive to social media — they certainly existed long before, perhaps even as early as when man first learned to communicate with one another — but the creation of social media is possibly the biggest chunk of fuel on the fire of discord, and regardless of where you go — whether it be Facebook, or Reddit, or Snapchat, or twitter, or YouTube, or Lemmy, or text messaging, or internet forums, or whatever other platforms exist out there, you will not find a platform that is not plagued — nay, riddled — with such awfulness. And no, I’m absolutely not saying that I myself have not played my fair part in toxicity because I have, but I’m willing to admit it. Are you?
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- Agreed.
- Prepare for downvotes.
What I think of downvotes to this:
Also thanks for agreeing!
I’d barely called Lemmy and most federated outlets as social, maybe more of a snarky anti-social media. Reddit id consider social media because they added all the ridiculous bells and whistles, tightened censorship to go public, pulled back api’s and old.Reddit and made the app a horrible experience. That’s what makes something truly social media for me, making it enshittified corporate shit that actively seeks to harm the most vulnerable groups and kids.
Yet, they’ve added application forms to most of Lemmy’s instances, not sure why exactly, but it’s one step towards becoming more and more like the other restrictive social media platforms go for. One day, you might be having to provide your phone number to sign up to it, or worse…
If that bothers you, run your own instance on which you are the only user.
I didn’t say it bothered me, just pointing out how Lemmy is becoming more ‘social media’-like. Plus, I’m quitting the platform in a short time anyway so it won’t make a difference to me.
It’s not an airport, you don’t have to announce your departure.
No, but it’s a good explanation to why I’m not gonna give a crap what happens to the platform
Bye Felicia
I’d barely called Lemmy and most federated outlets as social
Same. It’s a forum, that’s all. There are no faces, it’s pseudonymous at best, and I don’t care who those people are. I usually don’t even look at the “names” when I answer.
It’s like saying newsgroups of the 80s forums of the 90s are “social media” because someone is behind the emails.
Social media connects humans and humans are often bad. You’re confusing the source with the technology used to connect them.
I think you’re mistaken in thinking that “connection” in general is inherently neutral, and that the way that social media is implemented and must exist to survive is neutral.
I get that. I get that it’s the humans who are the core issue. What I’m staying is that social media provides a method or outlet for being vindictive (and that’s just one issue of social media. Others include data privacy, potential criminal activity etc.) in fact, I would argue that it is now the core outlet humans use that brings out the nastiness towards one another. And as I said in the post, no it isn’t the only outlet, it’s just a prominent one.
I do understand your point, it just feels like blaming cars for road rage. That being said, I think maybe we could say the corporations and billionaires are to blame for the algorithmic rage generation of the popular platforms but Lemmy exists without those algorithms so I feel like social media exists without it, the problem is, again, humans as most people just want that algorithmic rage. It always comes down to the human.
Yes but if cars didn’t exist, road rage would not exist (at least, not as we know it) regardless of whether the car was the root cause of road rage or not. You see my point: social media is a link in the chain that leads to toxicity, the same way that owning a car leads to road rage (as we experience it). All I’m saying is that social media is a bad invention not because it causes toxicity but because it exacerbates it by providing us with an outlet. I’m not saying you’re wrong btw, just clarifying
I think you’re right that there’s an accelerating effect. One of the cool things about the internet is that it allows people with niche interests to find each other and talk with each other. This can be really nice for people who like old board games or model trains or sexy animal costumes, but it can also foster communities for people whose identity is bound up in hating other people for their skin color, religion, sexuality, sexy animal costumes, etc. These hateful communities can reinforce beliefs and radicalize members. This sort of thing did happen before the internet, but I think it happens faster now.
Not unpopular, at least not with this crowd.
Oh boy, hope I don’t get banned for writing a ‘popular’ opinion lol
Social media was great in its early days I think! When it was mainly about helping people connect with others they didn’t know… It was an exciting idea! But it started to take a turn for the worse when the owners of these platforms wanted to expand and reach more people. They began doing anything, even harmful things, to get users to spend more time on the platforms and become dependent on them.
Algorithms now recommend more content that plays on people’s emotions, especially fear and anger! Platform owners made it possible for anyone to become a digital creator and earn money, which led creators to publish anything, even misleading information. Short and fast-paced content spread everywhere, and the original purpose of social media was lost.
There are days when I wonder, given the nature of the concept has changed so much, is it even really ‘social media’ anymore? And if not, at what point did it stop being social media (as it were then, at least)?
is it even really ‘social media’ anymore?
No. Meta has been very explicit about the fact that it’s a “data-driven ad company”. The platform exists to cultivate “engagement” (your attention) as a product they can sell to advertisers.
This is a popular opinion.
Oh dear, hope it doesn’t get banned
“And to be clear” probably shouldn’t be followed by the longest sentence known to the fediverse history, but this isn’t really an unpopular opinion. At least not on the fediverse
It’s not now, but given the signs, I perceive that the fediverse may one day become much more like other social media platforms that it tries to differentiate itself from. I doubt it will be popular if that happens
It should really be called Anti-Social Media
Also I fully expect AI to go down the same trajectory as social medoa, but 10x worse. Currently we’re in like the late 00s phase of AI I’d say
I think anonymous social media reveals a part of us that is almost always concealed, in “polite” society, on a grand scale. Some of it is ugly, but that ugliness has always been there, we’ve just always masked it for the sake of getting along with our peers. We have always had these masks, and we’ve always had dark corners of the world where we can take them off and revel in the petty villainy of unconstrained self-interest. Anonymous writings, secret societies, and the like. Now we have a (relatively) very densely networked place where we can all take off the polite mask and spread that petty villainy across the globe in seconds.
I think social media is a mirror of that human inclination to indulge in selfish or sometimes even spiteful behavior that might otherwise be constrained by shame, or politeness, or other societal norms. It’s very weird, and not always bad. More to the point, it’s always been there. It changes and mutates in novel ways in this medium, and I think there’s an accelerating, feedback-loop-y effect when you find an online peer group that normalizes misanthropic that we haven’t really been able to see at this scale before the internet, c.f. 4chan and its ilk. It is dangerous, and it does get people killed.
I don’t think it’s awful. I think it’s complicated and has some awful effects, but I think the larger part of my discomfort with social media is the notion that we have always been like this, it’s only now that we can see it as clearly as we do. Our communications technology is now at a stage where the worst person in the world, whoever that is, can get on a forum and start blasting the planet with whatever thoughts cross their mind. That is very new, and I think we are still very much in the adjustment period of dealing with that reality. It’s overwhelming.
Or to put it another way: social media brings out the very best and the very worst of humanity, and makes them all instantly accessible to everyone with the kit to interpret them. That’s very cool, but it also means that we all have to come face-to-face (so to speak) with the worst of humanity, and, oh boy, is it bad. I think it’s worth it though. I’d rather see the worst of humanity than be ignorant of it. We can’t fix problems we can’t see.
This is excellently written. Great observations.
Deserves to be saved. Well done!
TYVM ❤️
Meta is pissing me off rn
Meta is awful. I think Facebook is the clearest contemporary example of a part of the internet that is dead or nearly so, in the Dead Internet Theory sense of the word. The people who only use the internet to access Meta resources have a very skewed sense of reality. I think; it’s rather hard to get good data on that part of the internet :(
Meta had potential, and they squandered it. Just like so many others. Social media down the drain.
Worse; I think they did the opposite of squander it. They monetized it. It followed (and re-entrenched) the tech startup enshittification path of
make (or buy) cool thing -> attract users -> isolate users -> extract value from users (by making the cool thing shittier) as long as possible. The reason Zuck is a billionaire is that he executed the plan very well.
Social media is fine. Algorithmic feeds and rewarding “engagement” is where we went wrong.
Facebook actually used to be a decent platform. I remember it used to be a decent way to keep in touch with your circle of family and friends.
It all changed when they unilaterally switched everyone’s feeds from being chronological to algorithmic with no way to change it back.
It used to be, the first post on your feed was the newest, and once you started seeing old posts, you knew you were “caught up”. Overnight, the first dozen posts on your feed were always at least two weeks old, and rarely by people you actually knew, but because two jackasses have been arguing over eyebrows or whatever in the comments, they’re pushed to the top because “engagement”.
Over time, this led to a noticeable shift in the posts people would make. Instead of being simple, boring posts to catch people up on what’s happening in your life, people started posting their opinions, hot takes, and this slowly evolved into what we currently readily recognize as “engagement bait”.
This caused people to slowly become disjointed from their circle of family and friends. Either you were also posting non-informative engagement bait, or your posts were being hidden. Either way, ads and engagement became king, keeping in touch with people became secondary.
To push traffic even higher, Facebook refactored their site and app to require more clicks/touches to find/message your friends, and fewer clicks/touches to interact with posts on your feed. At this point, keeping in touch with people required more effort than engaging with algorithmic slop, and the descent has been accelerating ever since then.
It went from connecting with your friends to connecting with strangers, in an environment where most people weren’t in to connect with strangers.
Social media was alright back when the algorithm was “show the newest posts first.”
Once it started sorting things by engagement it created an incentive to be inflammatory and controversial.
4chan is a great early example of this because things only stayed there if they got additional posts, rewarding controversy.
if this is social media then its been around since the internet. functionally this is no different than newsgroups. its the keep engagement at all cost algorithms that is aweful.
Good thing you aren’t posting this on social media then. You’re posting it on a forum.
This is an unpopular opinion?
