Social spaces aren’t something that needs fixing.
We blame the problems caused by wealth inequality on technology as a way to not even discuss making the rich contribute to society
they could still do with some fixing
What’s the issue that you think social media is causing?
I’m willing to bet that wealth redistribution would fix almost any of the issues people blame on social media.
Ohh dude. That’s a really interesting thought. Genuinely. I wonder if this could actually reap positive consequences. But also to be fair if your main aim is to proliferate through engagement (see shock), then there’s no positive hope to have a good affect on the audience.
I also noticed something in my friend group. No one makes anything. Its all share share share. Im the only one taking original photos or videos or making jokes. Its kind of sad. And is not like their lives are boring either. They’d just rather consume others stuff.
Are most people like that?
I’ve started asking people what they have created lately… They seem to take it as an insult when it isn’t meant to be.
The reality is consuming is easier than producing. You can see it with the usage of phones and tablets vs laptops. It’s hard to create on a touch screen but it’s easy to consume.
Does making horrible horrible things in CK2 count as creation? If not I am simply creating a mess of my life.
Yeah its sad computing is dying because of ipads. Lot of people.dont even have a computer.
Yes.
Whatchu gonna do about it?
~(not asking specifically you, bridge, just didn’t want to leave the thread at a circle jerk)~
I mean lemmy is pretty fucking neat, i love it here, no need to fix anything.
It’s got its issues (for me the main one are the tankie scum devs), but it seems to be the best platform there is.
The good thing about it is you can move to clients like Piefed and still access all the content / communities.
(for me the main one are the tankie scum devs)
This right here is the crux of the problem and why the problem goes back so much further than the design and algorithms of platforms. We teach kids to focus on individual achievement, to celebrate the self, and we don’t teach empathy, something that needs to be taught young and can easily be taught but the west increasingly considers weakness and a dirty word.
When we fail to teach citizens of a society collectivism, because being a member of a society means you are part of a collective whether you decide to be a good collective that functions or one that operates against itself (herp derp competition!) that does not, you get communication between members like this.
“I hate these people fuck them they should me more like MEEEE” “their opinions suck because they aren’t more like MIIIINE” and we act as a bunch of petulant infants that resent each other’s very existence in OUR world.
If we were taught that it is our responsibility to lift one another up, if we rewarded people in society on the basis of who and how many others they’ve helped and not how much they hoarded for THEMSELVES, this wouldnt be as much of a problem. We could, now that we don’t have to survive in nature, orient our mindsets to the positive, which would have to be encouraged young. Instead we’re made to be like… This. A useful state for killing a rival in YOUR hunting area when there’s only enough game in the region for one tribe to survive the winter, not so much when trying to build a civilization up. And don’t get me started on the counterproductive mindfuck that is nation states and super serious imaginary lines between them, meant to protect hoards of INDIVIDUAL wealth of respective elites.
The problem is, how do you start such a virtuous cycle when everyone from the owners down are only concerned with “ME ME ME MINE MINE MINE?”
Then again you hate tankies, so go ahead and cuss me out for calling out the reality that capitalism, especially when it has effectively conquered the culture, turns people into selfish little gremlins more likely to shoot a stranger than help them.
Childish take. Perfect example of why western online leftism will always be a failure.
You wouldn’t be writing this shit if your family had to leave their due to a russian invasion and then eight years later having to deal with another full scale invasion (with a shad part landing in the house next to yours).
Grow up!
Oh I think the capitalist “grown ups” as you say only concerned with quarterly GDP and their own individual hoards in charge are doing fine on their own. Don’t you?
They don’t need some idiot commie child as you say like me getting in the way of this great society’s trajectory. This bull is loose!
I lost, we leftists lost, and since the capitalists are destroying the very COMMUNal climate we rely on from one breath to the next, it’s too late for us to ever turn it around, as civilization hangs by a thread on the easy baby “just don’t shit where you sleep” climate mode we enjoyed and are eviscerating as we speak in the name of year over year metastasis.
What does winning feel like? Is it awesome? Do you feel victorious in your capitalist society?
As long as the devs have an instance-agnostic ‘live and let live’ attitude and just ignore any instances they don’t politically like and advise others to do the same, it’s not really a problem.
If they ever try to enforce their ideology via their code: actual issue.
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What’s wrong with calling genocide white-whitewashing, pro-russian genocidal imperialism individuals scum.
The funny thing is the tankies don’t even speak Ukrainian or russian and have never lived in Ukraine or russian.
Literally scumbag roleplaying as communists.
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BULLSHIT
But what we find is that it’s not just that this content spreads; it also shapes the network structures that are formed. So there’s feedback between the effective emotional action of choosing to retweet something and the network structure that emerges. And then in turn, you have a network structure that feeds back what content you see, resulting in a toxic network. The definition of an online social network is that you have this kind of posting, reposting, and following dynamics. It’s quite fundamental to it. That alone seems to be enough to drive these negative outcomes.
Trying to grasp it in my own words;
Because social networks are about interactions and networks (follows, communities, topics, instances), they inherently human nature establish toxic networks.
Even when not showing content through engagement-based hot or active metrics, interactions will push towards networking effects of central players/influencers and filter and trigger bubbles.
If there were no voting, no followable accounts or communities, it would not be a social network anymore (by their definition).
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Social media isn’t broken. It’s working exactly how it was meant to. We just need to break free of it.
first of all, it’s a broad overgeneralization to assume that all social media is created with the intention to manipulate people. there was honest people running social media, but it’s long past. (in the corporate domain)
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social media can be useful if it presents non-emotional, non-brigading content. rational discourse is one of the valuable options possible. throwing away the whole internet because Xitter sucks is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
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but yes, social media is the new Volksempfänger and manipulates people (social engineering)
No social media was created to manipulate people. (Most) social media is a business, optimised to make money. You make money by showing people ads. You can show more ads to people if they stay on the platform longer. You can make people stay longer by engaging them emotionally. End of conspiracy…
also propaganda is just political ads, and the way companies make money on the internet is by showing ads …
Facebook got their seed money from Peter Thiel. They also employ a lot of ex CIA. So not sure about the no conspiracy thing.
Also the millions they take in creating targeted political ads in order to manipulate their users and influence elections isn’t a conspiracy. How they met with the President, kissed his ring, and then went all in on right wing content.
Yeah no conspiracy here, just keep walking
But it’s not possible to get unbiased content on the internet. Everything exists with an agenda behind it, for the sole reason that hosting anything is going to constantly cost money.
This wasn’t a huge deal when individuals were paying to host and share content to a small audience, it was a small amount of money and you could see their motives clearly (a forum for a hobby, a passion project, an online store, etc…).
Social media is different because it presents itself as a public forum where anything can be shared and hosted (for free) to as many people as you want. But they’re still footing a very large bill and the wide net of content makes their motives completely opaque. Nobody cares that much about the headaches of maintaining a free and open public forum, and any profit motive is just another way to sell manipulation.
yeah the commercialization of the internet is the problem, 100%. if it were hobby projects, it wouldn’t suck so hard.
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But that’s not profitable.
well i guess we’d have a better time thinking about non-profitable alternatives, then.
rational discourse is one of the valuable options possible.
Yeah, can’t say that I’ve seen a lot of that on social media.
You don’t need social media to do rational discourse, anyway. All you need is two-way communication, a problem that the Internet solved long before any Facebooks or Twitters popped up. You can have rational discourse on IRC, an email list, or even through instant messaging.
throwing away the whole internet because Xitter sucks is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
I know you’re being hyperbolic here, but unfortunately there are a lot of people now who really do see social media as “the whole Internet”. And they have thrown a lot away as a result.
rational discourse on IRC
Hahahahahahahaha
depends on who you’re talking to, and in which rooms.
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As long as you know you’re in an echo chamber there’s nothing wrong with it. Everything is an echo chamber of varying sizes.
Or do everything within your reach to make everything an echo chamber, cough cough fandom gatekeepers being toxic to people they don’t like and think are responsible to changes to their beloved media.
The amount of comments thinking that Lemmy is totally not like a typical social media is absurd.
Guys, we only don’t have major tracking of users here.That’s it! Everything else is the fucking same shit you’d see on facebook. The moment Lemmy gets couple tens of millions of users, we gonna become 2nd facebook.
It’s that there’s no incentive to have 80 million bots manipulate everything. Our user base is too small, and likely too jaded about fake internet points to be a target for scammers, ai slop bots, or advertisers.
Or at least that’s what I thought when I drink a refreshing Pepsi! hiss-crack! glugg glugg Aaaah!! PEPSI! The brown fizz that satisfies! Pepsi!
… If there are people to mislead with misinformation, or people with money to buy things, there will be incentive. I learned about this in this great book called
Lemmy is basically 30 or 40 Linux meme platforms begging for donations, full of people bitching about AI and politics, and recycling old reddit shitposts. I love it. I am home here. I love you all.
But, we aren’t running communities with millions of people trading crypto and stonks. There’s instances that are full on socialists. A pig butchering scam here would founder so badly they would banish anyone foolish enough to try it to redemtuon by spamming the comment sections of cooking blog posts before being summarily executed.
We have herd immunity.
Sorry but you are naive. That’s really all I can say about your view.
Just trying to be funny is all…
Exactly. Once we are a mainstream page to visit, it will go down as fast as any other page like this before.
That’s the real benefit of the Fediverse. Even if one instance becomes known for hosting bots, we can defederate them. Each instance isn’t the population of the whole. Plus, we don’t need to be huge. There’s no benefit from it.
My prediction is that manually reviewing user creation won’t scale to a high level and unless systems develop spam detection and reputation management similar to email then it’s not going to be limited to just one or two bad instances.
Its trivial to create my own instance with a new domain and there’s no limitations against sending ActivityPub messages to a server. Unfortunately the simplest fix is for big instances to restrict what instances can communicate to it, but that causes centralization.
Plus, we don’t need to be huge. There’s no benefit from it.
The benefit is breadth and depth of communities. Reddit is great because if you are interested in a topic, there’s a bunch of people talking about it.
Lemmy doesn’t have a neural net prediction/recommendation engine. This is a HUGE difference.
And for the same reasons folks got hooked on old reddit, folks get hooked on Lemmy (its me I’m folks please unplug me from the machine I can’t log out)
It’s not a typical social media because it’s decentralized, but it’s not immune to all the problems of social media by any means. I’m not sure why you’re using Facebook as an example rather than reddit.
I haven’t used FB in half a decade, but at least with respect to reddit, there are definitely more good “features” in the threadiverse than just lack of tracking.
Not saying there aren’t any issues or that scaling to 10 M MAUs won’t create new problems, but lack of tracking isn’t the only differentiating factor.
Yeah decentralization and open source software and protocols being big ones. It means that if the “main” culture turns reactionary, that we’re not trapped in the same spaces as the shithead just because we share a platform.
There could absolutely be two main fediverses, with no changes to the technology.
Yeah, op is clearly ignoring some very important differences that have actual, material consequences that are pretty obvious. The argument is that there’s no perfect solution therefore they’re all the same/similar. Which isn’t a great argument.
Facebook has lots of miss information and scams too, which here on Lemmy don’t have. Edit: if Lemmy was Facebook, then we would follow friends and share our locations and our photos
yes, and no. what really Facebook lacks (along the top social medias) is strong negative feedback.
I don’t think the village idiot is going that far with the flat earth conspiracy when is publicly downvoted to oblivion
I beg to disagree.
The reason all these delusional posts getting even upvoted to begin with is due to many like-minded people are gathered together in the same sub. As an example, reddit’s r/democrats and r/republicans. One is clearly more sane than another, yet try to say something in a wrong sub - get downvoted to oblivion. But if you spill your delusional shit in a r/republicans - upvotes galore and comments of praise.
Facebook groups are the same shit. And so is Lemmy. One thing in hexbear that is allowed could/will be the reason you got a ban in .world. Up/Downvotes cant fix that.
tl;dr Village idiots can join together to accumulate their own conspiracies in a big ass circlejerk, and social media has no power to stop it.
Reddit has downvotes. That hasn’t saved it from misinformation, trolls, and radicalization.
if we’re immune to the problems, it would be because people here use critical thinking skills instead of swallowing large amounts of contents. that’s the sole reason, it has nothing to do with the network’s size.
“Fixing” social media is like “fixing” capitalism. Any manmade system can be changed, destroyed, or rebuilt. It’s not an impossible task but will require a fundamental shift in the way we see/talk to/value each other as people.
The one thing I know for sure is that social media won’t ever improve if we all accept the narrative that it can’t be improved.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
-Ursula K Le Guin
Seriously, read her books. I looooove „The Dispossessed“
The Left Hand of Darkness is excellent too. Sci-fi from the 1960s about a planet whose people have no fixed sex or gender, and a man from Earth who struggles to understand and function in this society. That description makes it sound very worthy, but it’s actually gripping and moving.
LeGuin is a treasure.
Particularly apt given that many of the biggest problems with social media are problems of capitalism. Social media platforms have found it most profitable to monetize conflict and division, the low self-esteem of teenagers, lies and misinformation, envy over the curated simulacrum of a life presented by a parasocial figure.
These things drive engagement. Engagement drives clicks. Clicks drive ad revenue. Revenue pleases shareholders. And all that feeds back into a system that trades negativity in the real world for positivity on a balance sheet.
Yeah, this author is the pop-sci / sci-fi media writer on Ars Technica, not one of the actual science coverage ones that stick to their area of expertise, and you can tell by the overly broad, click bait, headline, that is not actually supported by the research at hand.
The actual research is using limited LLM agents and only explores an incredibly limited number of interventions. This research does not remotely come close to supporting the question of whether or not social media can be fixed, which in itself is a different question from harm reduction.
The article is mostly an interview with one of the researchers that produced the study. Don’t like the headline? Fine. Just read what that researcher has to say.
That’s not an excuse to have a false and misleading headline.
If you read the article, the argument they are making is that you cannot fix social media by simply tweaking the algorithm. We need a new form of social media that is not just everyone screaming into the void for attention, which includes Lemmy, Mastodon, and other Fediverse platforms.
This is spot on. The issue with any system is that people don’t pay attention to the incentives.
When a surgeon earns more if he does more surgeries with no downside, most surgeons in that system will obviously push for surgeries that aren’t necessary. How to balance incentives should be the main focus on any system that we’re part of.
You can pretty much understand someone else’s behavior by looking at what they’re gaining or what problem they’re avoiding by doing what they’re doing.
No shit. Unless the Internet becomes democratised and publicly funded like other media in other countries like the BBC or France24, social media will always be toxic. They thrive in provocations and there are studies to prove it, and social media moguls know this. Hell, there are people who make a living triggering people to gain attention and maintain engagement, which leads to advertising revenue and promotions.
As long as profit motive exists, the social media as we know it can never truly be fixed.
Yes and yes. What is crazy to me is that the owners of social media want more than profits. They also have a political agenda and are willing to tip the scales against any politician who opposes their interests or the interests of their major shareholders. Facebook promoted right wing disinformation campaigns against leaders who they disliked such as mark Carney. Their shareholders should be sued into oblivion and their c levels thrown into prison. Yet our legal system forbids this.
Its performing as expected
Should just be people can’t be fixed…
The article argues that extremist views and echo chambers are inherent in public social networks where everyone is trying to talk to everyone else. That includes Fediverse networks like Lemmy and Mastodon.
They argue for smaller, more intimate networks like group chats among friends. I agree with the notion, but I am not sure how someone can build these sorts of environments without just inviting a group of friends and making an echo chamber.
I had couple of fairly diverse group chats and the more sensitive people left real quick. In my experience you can discuss politics or economy among friends with different views but when you touch social issues it gets toxic real fast. Pretty much like on social networks.
They left entirely? Not just tuned out the group until the topic of conversation moved on?
It kind of always circled back so they left after couple of times. But I’m sure it depends on the group. If the group serves some purpose (like organizing some meetups) people definitely stay for longer. If it’s for talking shit I don’t think it works well. Same like social media.
There’s actually some interesting research behind this - Dunbar’s number suggests humans can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships, which is why those smaller networks tend to work better psychologicaly than the massive free-for-alls we’ve built.
Of course -corporate- social media can’t be fixed … it already works exactly they way they want it to…
We’re on the solution right now, lmao
