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?
Yes.
Whatchu gonna do about it?
~(not asking specifically you, bridge, just didn’t want to leave the thread at a circle jerk)~
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.
“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“
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.
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.
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.
Meta and twitter cease to exist tomorrow and 99% of the issues are solved IMO
The fediverse is social media and it doesn’t have anything close to the same kinds of harmful patterns
It’s almost like the problem isn’t social media, but the algorithms that put content in front of your eyeballs to keep your engagement in order to monetize you. Like a casino.
Exactly, the one big issue with the modern world is the algorithms pushing for engagement as the only important metric.
Although I love Lemmy, I find it will be hard to recommend a normal young person to hop on Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, Misskey, Iceshrimp, etc. Most people on here talk about tech and politics. If you scroll through the main feed, you won’t get stuff from other communities unless you seek it out.
Not diverse enough, but once it gets diverse, it will probably enshitify and make the community mainstream garbage. Then we’re back to square one with people making clickbait posts and attention seeking people.
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 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.
Social media isn’t broken. It’s working exactly how it was meant to. We just need to break free of it.
We’re on the solution right now, lmao
Of course -corporate- social media can’t be fixed … it already works exactly they way they want it to…
Its performing as expected
Ofcourse not. The issue with social media are the people. Algorithms just bring out the worst in us but it didn’t make us like that, we already were.
From my point of view something that brings out the worst in us sounds like a really big part of the issue.
We’ve always been modified by our situations, so why not create better situations rather than lamenting that we don’t have the grit to break through whatever toxic society we find ourselves graphed onto?
Sorry I know I’m putting a lot on your comment that I know you didn’t mean, but I see this kind of unintentional crypto doomerism a lot. I think it holds people to an unhealthy standard.
It is a big part of the issue, but as Lemmy clearly demonstrates, that issue doesn’t go away even when you remove the algorithm entirely.
I see it a lot like driving cars - no matter how much better and safer we make them, accidents will still happen as long as there’s an ape behind the wheel, and probably even after that. That’s not to say things can’t be improved - they definitely can - but I don’t think it can ever be “fixed,” because the problem isn’t it - it’s us. You can’t fix humans by tweaking the code on social media.
It magnifies the worst in people.
Neat.
Release the epstein files then burn it all down.
The study is based on having LLMs decide to amplify one of the top ten posts on their timeline or share a news headline. LLMs aren’t people, and the authors have not convinced me that they will behave like people in this context.
The behavioral options are restricted to posting news headlines, reposting news headlines, or being passive. There’s no option to create original content, and no interventions centered on discouraging reposting. Facebook has experimented with limits to reposting and found such limits discouraged the spread of divisive content and misinformation.
I mostly use social media to share pictures of birds. This contributes to some of the problems the source article discusses. It causes fragmentation; people who don’t like bird photos won’t follow me. It leads to disparity of influence; I think I have more followers than the average Mastodon account. I sometimes even amplify conflict.
Fixing social media is like fixing guns so they can’t hurt or kill anyone anymore. Both have been designed for a very particular purpose.
Lemmy is social media. So is Mastodon. So is peer tube. And everything else in the fediverse.
So I wouldn’t compare social media to a gun, across the board.
All those platforms work the same way. In the end it’s all about the same social dynamics, about control. “We are the alternative to all the shitty peer groups out there! Join us!” is one of the oldest tricks in the playbook. There is no alternative. Because it’s all based on human nature.
Social media hasn’t been designed to cause these problems, though. It’s more a babelfish thing.
Every problem is an opportunity to earn even more money or gain even more power. Bad for average users, great for those who own and control the platform.
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.
