Technology

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.

Getting banned from Facebook. After a decade of clapping back against racists. Has been the best thing in my life. So glad to be out of there. Just wish I could have saved my pics first.

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 dream was that social media would help revitalize the public sphere and support the kind of constructive political dialogue that your paper deems "vital to democratic life." That largely hasn't happened.

Their idea is basically that people need to be told the same things to what to believe in so that democracy can work as it's supposed to and social media is disrupting that with all the conspiracy shit, flame wars and polarization of opinions. The issue is that this common idea is fermented by the boomer generation. They grew up in really quite anomalous post war world when there was first time in human history basically monolithic mass media that people watched it AND had high trust in AND the system provided more for the masses more than it does now. Those then lead to to high societal inclusion and high social cohesion that again fed into the prosperity. Now we have fragmented information sphere and things are shit are shit, political center is hated by most and radicalism is once again rising.

However so called democracy or collective decision making in general itself does not rely on people not believing in crazy shit, not being fed the best possible validated information, or god forbid having unorthodox ideas of their own or developing factionalism or totally different reading on reality. It helps make it smoother and avoids violence, but that "smoothness of process" that boomers have come to expect is also why society in wider terms is politically stagnant and rotting. People seem to live in different realities, because in a sense we are, because our economic realities can be so different and decoupled form the mainstream narrative. It never didn't have to get this bad, but social media only a venting mechanism not the reason for the growing divides. The division in society and the general anguish is real IRL, it just takes forms of all kinds of irrational and counterproductive forms online. The problem isn't really that people are factional and can't agree with each other, it's that nobody can no longer agree with the monolithic unpopular political center that is holding on to power for dear life.

Good thing is, you don't need to use it. Bad thing is, it affects reality.

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.

Can't?

I'm on Lemmy, am I not?

It CAN be fixed, the question if the will is there. We need to inform and teach more people

Sounds like it's time to delete it, then.

Using Bluesky as the non-algorithmic example is problematic - they still need to show high user engagement numbers for their VC owners. Mastodon do not have the same problems since on the contrary a Mastodon instance owner has an economic incentive in making sure spambots and troll factory accounts get closed down asap.

social media is what it's made to be. social media as we use it is flawed.

all of the platforms just do different colors of the same damn thing.

Social media will be fixed by - wait for it...

Now.

Done. Fixed it, you may thank me later.

Yours,

B-TR3E - the man who fixed social media