As long as people worship themselves (but also, paradoxically, require everyone’s attention and approval all the time just to make it to the next day), it will continue being that way. For those who see it for what it is and are disgusted by it, we have Lemmy/discussion boards.
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)
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.
But that’s not profitable.
well i guess we’d have a better time thinking about non-profitable alternatives, then.
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…
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
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.
When it reaches a large enough audience, the regime takes control.
They don’t even hide it.
Lemmy for now is not important enough.
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Should just be people can’t be fixed…
They work perfectly as intended and do what the US regime wants since they control all the important ones.
Social media is media. Too important to leave unchecked.Removed by mod
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.
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.
Also worth considering the reputational factors.
I joined ML by mistake and I was pissed off to find out that it was a nest of degenerate tankie roaches.
I had experience with Mastodon, so I switched instances, but that might not be the case for others looking for a non-US oligarch internet platform.
They most definitely do not have a “live and let live” attitude for people dealing with russian genocidal occupation, but that’s a discussion for another day.
degenerate tankie roaches.
There we go, fascists dehumanising people.
You would’ve been a camp guard 80 years ago.Fuck right off with your support for russian genocidal imperialism.
Hope you and your tankie scum friends meet the same fate as Donbas cowboy, Russell Bentley.
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
Vansyatsky and Agaltsev are suspected of blowing up a car with Bentley’s body in it and ordering Bazhin to get rid of what was left of his remains.
hahaha are you some seething ukrofash?
Not reading your BS, you lost buddy. Send the ghost of kiev 😂
https://archive.ph/Za0cf
Certainly the problem is not the rabid Mc Carthy fascists calling people scum
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.
Only genociders I’ve seen where those ukrofascists trying to ethnically cleanse eastern ex-ukranus.
Not many more of them to send to the meatgrinder huh?
(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?
What are you on about?
I never mentioned anything about capitalism and communism.
At any rate, tankies are supporters of genocidal, authoritarian state-capitalism, so whatever you’re trying to imply is moot.
BULLSHIT
Let’s just pretend nothing after MySpace ever happened
I’m not surprised. I am surprised that the researchers were surprised, though.
Bridging algorithms seem promising.
The results were far from encouraging. Only some interventions showed modest improvements. None were able to fully disrupt the fundamental mechanisms producing the dysfunctional effects. In fact, some interventions actually made the problems worse. For example, chronological ordering had the strongest effect on reducing attention inequality, but there was a tradeoff: It also intensified the amplification of extreme content. Bridging algorithms significantly weakened the link between partisanship and engagement and modestly improved viewpoint diversity, but it also increased attention inequality. Boosting viewpoint diversity had no significant impact at all.
The original source is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385
Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel method – generative social simulation – that embeds Large Language Models within Agent-Based Models to create socially rich synthetic platforms. We create a minimal platform where agents can post, repost, and follow others. We find that the resulting following-networks reproduce three well-documented dysfunctions: (1) partisan echo chambers; (2) concentrated influence among a small elite; and (3) the amplification of polarized voices – creating a “social media prism” that distorts political discourse. We test six proposed interventions, from chronological feeds to bridging algorithms, finding only modest improvements – and in some cases, worsened outcomes. These results suggest that core dysfunctions may be rooted in the feedback between reactive engagement and network growth, raising the possibility that meaningful reform will require rethinking the foundational dynamics of platform architecture.
The linked article also includes an interview. At least in this case, it’s not only a rephrasing of the paper or paper abstract.
(Just pointing it out here so people don’t skip the article while thinking there’s nothing else there.)
We’re on the solution right now, lmao
Uhm, I seem to recall that social media was actually pretty good in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The authors used AI models as the users. Could it be that their models have internalized the effects of the algorithms that fundamentally changed social media from what it used to be over a decade ago, and then be reproducing those effects in their experiments? Sounds like they’re treating models as if they’re humans, and they are not. Especially when it comes to changing behaviour based on changes in the environment, which is what they were testing by trying different algorithms and mitigation strategies.
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.
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)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.
Yeah its sad computing is dying because of ipads. Lot of people.dont even have a computer.
Does making horrible horrible things in CK2 count as creation? If not I am simply creating a mess of my life.
Because how to use it is baked into what it is. Like many big tech products, it’s not just a tool but also a philosophy. To use it is also to see the world through its (digital) eyes.
I mean, I feel like just shutting it down would solve at least some problems. Shuttering it all, video sharing platforms included.
Not a situation most anyone would agree on, but it’s an idea.
