- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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“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.
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
lemmy does have problems though. Lots of emotional, judgemental and brigading content still. But it’s less here than elsewhere, probably.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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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…
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.
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.
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.
Yes.
Whatchu gonna do about it?
~(not asking specifically you, bridge, just didn’t want to leave the thread at a circle jerk)~
Its performing as expected
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.
Social media was a mistake, tbh
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.
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.
