I 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.
Part 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 highly unlikely that all those factors always aligned in the direction of good.
All too often a collection of cherry picked studies are presented in books targeting the worried public. It can build a public opinion that is at odds with the data. Some people write books just to express their ideas. Others like Jonathan Haidt seem to think that putting their efforts into convincing as many people as possible of their ideology is preferable to putting effort into demonstrating that their ideas are true. There is this growing notion that perception is reality, convince enough people and it is true.
I am prepared to accept aspects of social media are bad. Clearly identify why and how and perhaps we can make progress addressing each thing. Declaring it's all bad acts as a deterrent to removing faults. I become very sceptical when many disparate threads of the same thing seem to coincidentally turn out to be bad. That suggests either there is an underlying reason that has been left unstated and unproven or the information I have been presented with is selective.
Social 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.
We, consumers online, are sliced and diced on every single dimension possible in order to optimize our clicks for another penny.
As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.
As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.
It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days
The 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.
If the internet is in fact "the largest social media platform", then anonymity absolutely has to go as my public-facing telemetry server [0] based on DNS as a transport, and not rooted to the ICANN DNS tree, gets 1000+ abusive requests for every legitimate one. I'm supposed to return REFUSED to each and every one [1] of them (not drop them) and I'm not supposed to publish the IP addresses involved. Granted they could be spoofed, but the only way we'll ever know is to go ahead and publish so that a global picture can be developed and the owners of the addresses can tell us that they're being spoofed.
[0] One of the pieces of telemetry is the addresses abusing the server.
[1] I, and many other operators violate this stability requirement and drop traffic. [2]
[2] There are no internet police. If there were then BCP 38 would be enforced and this particular problem would largely go away.
It's more specific than social media. It's engagement maximizing (read: addiction maximizing) algorithms. Social media wasn't nearly as bad until algorithmic engagement maximizing feeds replaced temporal or topic based feeds and user-directed search.
Two people walk past you on the street. One says "hi," and the other strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?
A politician says something sane and reasonable. Another politician mocks someone, insults someone, or says something completely asinine. Which one maximizes engagement?
This is why our president is a professional troll, many of our public intellectuals are professional trolls, and politics is becoming hyper-polarized into raging camps fixated on crazy extremes. It maximizes engagement.
The "time on site" KPI is literally destroying civilization by biasing public discourse toward trash.
I think "trash maximizes engagement" should be considered an established fact at this point. If you A/B test for engagement you will converge on a mix of trolling, tabloid sensationalism, fear porn, outrage porn, and literal porn, and that’s our public discourse.
Without social media, we'd be left with mainstream media, which is a very narrow set of channels that those in power can control. Despite rampant censorship on social media, it's still the best way to circumvent propaganda and give people a voice.
Full anonymity in social media should not be allowed. It becomes a cover for bad actors (propagandists, agents, disinformation, bots, age-inappropriate, etc.) It doesn’t have to be a full identity, but knowing your user metadata is open during interactions can instill a sense of responsibility and consequence of social action. As in real life.
The missing link to our epistemic collapse is language. The acceleration of language, which is arbitrary, accelerates language distortion. The contagion on social media is merely a symptom of the disease of language.
You reap what you sew. Stupid and uninformed voices receiving equivalent status to wise scientific experts was a mistake. Witnessing the flat Earth crowd growing over the decades encapsulates everything wrong with social media.
Same. 9 months into quitting socials I feel like I got a new brain. I’m appreciating my surroundings and noticing the cadence of the day more than I have in years. I’ve been killing it at work and got a promotion. Just last year I had been thinking to myself that my mind had lost its sharpness since college. Now I feel like it’s noticeably expanding!
I will never ever ever ever go back. The perks of online connection were never worth the sacrifices.
"everyone publicly talking in the same room" social media really sucks. I've really enjoyed the smaller-scale, better-curated interaction on mastodon. It feels like a giant step forward in how people can connect and socialize online.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadThat article needs to have about 80% of the words cut out of it.
When the author straight up tells you: I'm posting this in an attempt to increase my subscribership, you know you're in for some blathering.
In spite of that, personally I think algorithmic feeds have had a terrible effect on many people.
I've never participated, and never will...
The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
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 highly unlikely that all those factors always aligned in the direction of good.
All too often a collection of cherry picked studies are presented in books targeting the worried public. It can build a public opinion that is at odds with the data. Some people write books just to express their ideas. Others like Jonathan Haidt seem to think that putting their efforts into convincing as many people as possible of their ideology is preferable to putting effort into demonstrating that their ideas are true. There is this growing notion that perception is reality, convince enough people and it is true.
I am prepared to accept aspects of social media are bad. Clearly identify why and how and perhaps we can make progress addressing each thing. Declaring it's all bad acts as a deterrent to removing faults. I become very sceptical when many disparate threads of the same thing seem to coincidentally turn out to be bad. That suggests either there is an underlying reason that has been left unstated and unproven or the information I have been presented with is selective.
For all we know there are millions who have withdrawn and are making the case outside of social media. Or living the case.
This reply seems a bit fish-in-water to me.
As a side benefit, when you do this enough, the pendulum that goes over the middle line for any of these arbitrary-but-improves-clicks division builds momentum until it hits the extremes. On either side-- it doesn't matter, cause it will swing back just as hard, again and again.
As a side benefit the back and forth of the pendulum is very distracting to the public so we do not pay attention to who is pushing it. Billions of collective hours spent fighting with no progress except for the wallets of rich ppl.
It almost feels like a conspiracy but I think it's just the direct, natural result of the vice driven economy we have these days
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.
[0] One of the pieces of telemetry is the addresses abusing the server.
[1] I, and many other operators violate this stability requirement and drop traffic. [2]
[2] There are no internet police. If there were then BCP 38 would be enforced and this particular problem would largely go away.
Two people walk past you on the street. One says "hi," and the other strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?
A politician says something sane and reasonable. Another politician mocks someone, insults someone, or says something completely asinine. Which one maximizes engagement?
This is why our president is a professional troll, many of our public intellectuals are professional trolls, and politics is becoming hyper-polarized into raging camps fixated on crazy extremes. It maximizes engagement.
The "time on site" KPI is literally destroying civilization by biasing public discourse toward trash.
I think "trash maximizes engagement" should be considered an established fact at this point. If you A/B test for engagement you will converge on a mix of trolling, tabloid sensationalism, fear porn, outrage porn, and literal porn, and that’s our public discourse.
Now I'm glad I never understood it well enough to use it.
What a shame that these clickbait headlines make it to the front page.
“Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2102061118
I will never ever ever ever go back. The perks of online connection were never worth the sacrifices.
The world is rather larger than the US and Europe. I physically endure myopia and frankly Mr Witkin seems to figuratively suffer from it.
I need only mention the name: TikTok.