Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/Open linkView original on lemmy.world447
Comments136https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
“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.
-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.
The article is mostly an interview with one of the researchers that produced the study. Don't like the headline? Fine. Just read what that researcher has to say.
That's not an excuse to have a false and misleading headline.
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.
Facebook was pretty boring before they tried to make money. Still ick, but mostly just people posting pictures of activities with family or friends.
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.
Did you read the article? Their findings were that not using such algorithms did not have the expected effect. That social networks themselves, by their nature, lead to similar network, filter, and trigger effects. Chronological order made it worse, not better, apparently.
The engagement driven algorithms making it worse seems intuitive. So I'm surprised and skeptical too. I haven't read their paper, only the article/interview.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft would still be there, so the Internet seems to be suffering from a metastatic cancer at this point. Cutting off two revolting lumps helps, but the prognosis doesn’t look that great.
None of those have had much success in creating social networks that suck people in quite like the others
Not to say they don't have their own problems, but the bulk of problems with social media come squarely from meta & twitter.
That’s true as far as the social media landscape is concerned. I was talking about the internet as a whole.
There will be a big curtaining of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Adobe if Facebook, TikTok and Twitter (and YouTube) have their algorithmic feeds outlawed.
It would probably cause the AI bubble to burst too so our OSs, Applications and Search Engines (and Government) would become usable again.
who will pay our representatives to push this through?
lemmy does have problems though. Lots of emotional, judgemental and brigading content still. But it's less here than elsewhere, probably.
It has. Discussions here are mostly, just like elsewhere, people throwing arrogant smartass-looking text at each other and refusing to elaborate or explain or reason. Due to the experience of getting into such, people who'd actually discuss something instead "money-first" post with a set of markers hinting at their opinions and possible arguments, and masquerade discussion as agreement. It's only a little less exhausting than going into a shit-throwing contest, even if more rewarding.
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 that there's no incentive to have 80 million bots manipulate everything. Our user base is too small, and likely too jaded about fake internet points to be a target for scammers, ai slop bots, or advertisers.
Or at least that's what I thought when I drink a refreshing Pepsi! hiss-crack! glugg glugg Aaaah!! PEPSI! The brown fizz that satisfies! Pepsi!
... If there are people to mislead with misinformation, or people with money to buy things, there will be incentive. I learned about this in this great book called
Lemmy is basically 30 or 40 Linux meme platforms begging for donations, full of people bitching about AI and politics, and recycling old reddit shitposts. I love it. I am home here. I love you all.
But, we aren't running communities with millions of people trading crypto and stonks. There's instances that are full on socialists. A pig butchering scam here would founder so badly they would banish anyone foolish enough to try it to redemtuon by spamming the comment sections of cooking blog posts before being summarily executed.
We have herd immunity.
Sorry but you are naive. That's really all I can say about your view.
Just trying to be funny is all...
Exactly. Once we are a mainstream page to visit, it will go down as fast as any other page like this before.
That's the real benefit of the Fediverse. Even if one instance becomes known for hosting bots, we can defederate them. Each instance isn't the population of the whole. Plus, we don't need to be huge. There's no benefit from it.
My prediction is that manually reviewing user creation won't scale to a high level and unless systems develop spam detection and reputation management similar to email then it's not going to be limited to just one or two bad instances.
Its trivial to create my own instance with a new domain and there's no limitations against sending ActivityPub messages to a server. Unfortunately the simplest fix is for big instances to restrict what instances can communicate to it, but that causes centralization.
The benefit is breadth and depth of communities. Reddit is great because if you are interested in a topic, there's a bunch of people talking about it.
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
yes, and no. what really Facebook lacks (along the top social medias) is strong negative feedback.
I don't think the village idiot is going that far with the flat earth conspiracy when is publicly downvoted to oblivion
I beg to disagree.
The reason all these delusional posts getting even upvoted to begin with is due to many like-minded people are gathered together in the same sub. As an example, reddit's r/democrats and r/republicans. One is clearly more sane than another, yet try to say something in a wrong sub - get downvoted to oblivion. But if you spill your delusional shit in a r/republicans - upvotes galore and comments of praise.
Facebook groups are the same shit. And so is Lemmy. One thing in hexbear that is allowed could/will be the reason you got a ban in .world. Up/Downvotes cant fix that.
tl;dr Village idiots can join together to accumulate their own conspiracies in a big ass circlejerk, and social media has no power to stop it.
Reddit has downvotes. That hasn't saved it from misinformation, trolls, and radicalization.
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)
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.
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...
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
also propaganda is just political ads, and the way companies make money on the internet is by showing ads ..
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.
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.
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.
Hahahahahahahaha
depends on who you're talking to, and in which rooms.
But that's not profitable.
well i guess we'd have a better time thinking about non-profitable alternatives, then.
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...
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.
Or do everything within your reach to make everything an echo chamber, cough cough fandom gatekeepers being toxic to people they don't like and think are responsible to changes to their beloved media.
I think just going back to internet forums circa early 2000s is probably a better way to engage honestly. They're still around, just not as "smartphone friendly" and doomscroll-enabled, due to the format.
I'm talking stuff like SomethingAwful, GaiaOnline, Fark, Newgrounds forum, GlockTalk, Slashdot, vBulletin etc.
These types of forums allowed you to discuss timely issues and news if you wanted. You could go a thousand miles deep on some bizarre subculture or stick to general discussion. They also had protomeme culture before that was a thing - aka "embedded image macros".
Anything that is topic focussed rather than following individuals is a big difference, and then take away the engagement algorithm and it’s much better.
This is a good point. It's like asking the question: "What is more important in politics? People, or ideas?"
People respond very differently to that. To some it's people, and to some it's ideas. That is why you have Xitter-like microblogging which is focused around people, and reddit-like communities which are focused around topics/ideas.
That's what I've been hoping for with Reddit and now Lemmy. I don't care about individuals, I care about topic based discussion.
My problem with forums is they are more like a club, where you get loss of off-topic discussion by people who happen to share an interest. I don't care what tech nerds think about medicine on a tech nerd forum, and joining dozens of forums to get the right discussion is a huge pain.
Forums are cool, and I use a few, but I really want a place that connects different subjects.
Boowahahahahaha, I've used those with PSP default web browser. With Nintendo Wii web browser. With Java phone web browser (admittedly that was only to read, and very slowly).
Anyway, have clumsy sweaty big fingers (unfortunately due to my behavior girls don't extrapolate that feature anywhere anymore), strongly prefer anything with physical keys.
Images, links, enormous smilies' sets, colored text.
Its performing as expected
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.
Does making horrible horrible things in CK2 count as creation? If not I am simply creating a mess of my life.
Yeah its sad computing is dying because of ipads. Lot of people.dont even have a computer.
Yes.
Whatchu gonna do about it?
(not asking specifically you, bridge, just didn't want to leave the thread at a circle jerk)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.
I mean lemmy is pretty fucking neat, i love it here, no need to fix anything.
BULLSHIT
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.
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.
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.
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 media was a mistake, tbh
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.
The reason why it brings out the worst in people is because it has open borders. You can shit into the network and move on. If you were forced to stay and live with your shit, you'd shit less into the public domain. That means small networks, harder to move to other/new networks, ...
It magnifies the worst in people.
The original source is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385
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.)
Neat.
Release the epstein files then burn it all down.
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.
What is not social media? Were the forums from before Friendster, MySpace, Facebook social media too? I don't know anyone here. Is a mall a house?
Social media is defined by users being the main source of content. Not by friendship or acquaintance. Fox News is not social media, because you can’t just upload content to Fox News.
Reddit certainly had its problems but was actually pretty good for the ~15 years before it started getting enshittified more and more to try to extract value.
The AlGoRyThMs are what is inducing the social damage.
Even games of chance (like Poker Machines and) would be less destructive if they were fairer and less engaging.
Social media hasn't been designed to cause these problems, though. It's more a babelfish thing.
The article argues that extremist views and echo chambers are inherent in public social networks where everyone is trying to talk to everyone else. That includes Fediverse networks like Lemmy and Mastodon.
They argue for smaller, more intimate networks like group chats among friends. I agree with the notion, but I am not sure how someone can build these sorts of environments without just inviting a group of friends and making an echo chamber.
I had couple of fairly diverse group chats and the more sensitive people left real quick. In my experience you can discuss politics or economy among friends with different views but when you touch social issues it gets toxic real fast. Pretty much like on social networks.
They left entirely? Not just tuned out the group until the topic of conversation moved on?
It kind of always circled back so they left after couple of times. But I'm sure it depends on the group. If the group serves some purpose (like organizing some meetups) people definitely stay for longer. If it's for talking shit I don't think it works well. Same like social media.
There's actually some interesting research behind this - Dunbar's number suggests humans can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships, which is why those smaller networks tend to work better psychologicaly than the massive free-for-alls we've built.
Should just be people can't be fixed....
Pre print journalism fucking bugs me because the journalists themselves can't actually judge if anything is worth discussing so they just look for click bait shit.
This methodology to discover what interventions do in human environments seems particularly deranged to me though:
LLM agents trained on social media dysfunction recreate it unfailingly. No shit. I understand they gave them personas to adopt as prompts, but prompts cannot and do not override training data. As we've seen multiple times over and over. LLMs fundamentally cannot maintain an identity from a prompt. They are context engines.
Particularly concerning sf the silo claims. LLMs riffing on a theme over extended interactions because the tokens keep coming up that way is expected behavior. LLMs are fundamentally incurious and even more prone to locking into one line of text than humans as the longer conversation reinforces it.
Determining the functionality of what the authors describe as a novel approach might be more warranted than making conclusions on it.
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.
I'm not surprised. I am surprised that the researchers were surprised, though.
Bridging algorithms seem promising.
Veerry interesting, yes...
Let's just pretend nothing after MySpace ever happened
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
Good thing is, you don't need to use it. Bad thing is, it affects reality.
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.
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.
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.
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
While and improvement Lemmy is far from perfect. The upvote-downvote sytem of reddit alone encourages group think and self censorship. It doesn't really help that much that we can go circlejerk in some other instance if we get hated on or banned by mods. We are still encouraged to keep in line to keep the bubble intact.
After 20 years of living with it, I've decided I don't like the downvote. The upvote is fine.
Reddit's founders, early on tried to encourage people to treat the downvote as moderation. It was meant to mean that a thing doesn't belong on reddit and people shouldn't see it. Of course that quickly became mere dislike or disagreement.
I'd prefer an approach that requires some input about what's wrong with a post in order to reduce its prominence; a restricted list of options as in Slashdot's moderation would be sufficient, I think. I'm not sure whether this should necessarily require also making a report to a more powerful admin/moderator, but I lean toward making that optional in most communities.
A lot of the time, I downvote troll content that should not be engaged with. Like, not technically against the rules, but definitely someone who is not posting in good faith. If I responded to the post, I'd be contributing to the problem.
I don't mean replying, but selecting from a menu of possible reasons to downrank a post. Slashdot's moderation system that I mentioned earlier has (or had - haven't looked there in a while) "troll" as one of the categories.
the problem is algorithms. during the whole bluesky promo all over lemmy while everyone was shitting on mastodon. the only thing that's broken is algorithms, and once you throw them out social media is immediately fixed - but of course the primary argument of mastodon vs bluesky was that mastodon requires you to curate your content (like joining a sub on reddit to see it on your front page stream, before algorithms fucked that site, and the thing is people LOVED old reddit so i fail to see how this is bad and doesn't work, but hey, all of lemmy said so, so who am i to blame) whereas bluesky being a relaunch of twitter and literally curating content for you no matter if you actually want to see it or not but for most people reactionary content is the only content they happily interact with anyway so algorithms makes a lot of sense for them because they feel they are engaging more with the site despite the pointless empty engagement they are doing instead of interacting with real users and real content on pages where you have to actively curate your content instead of being fed the lowest hanging fruit.
/ rant off
Right. We fix ourselves first, we are already here and we do not attempt to control others. We make and go our own way every moment.
Most people don't know about this experience, probably aren't looking for this experience, or would not know how to interact with it. I know it sounds crazy, but Reddit still confuses many people. Lemmy's a different ball of similar wax.
They want the saccharine-coated dopamine-filled mass-produced low-effort meme cesspool that IG, TikTok, etc. all provide. They don't know they want more until they decide they're done with it and start to look. Until then, it's like showing hieroglyphs to an iguana.
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.
Sounds like it's time to delete it, then.
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.
Trying to grasp it in my own words;
Because social networks are about interactions and networks (follows, communities, topics, instances), they inherently human nature establish toxic networks.
Even when not showing content through engagement-based hot or active metrics, interactions will push towards networking effects of central players/influencers and filter and trigger bubbles.
If there were no voting, no followable accounts or communities, it would not be a social network anymore (by their definition).
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
Hi it's still broken on my machine. I've tried turning it off and on again
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.
Lmaooo betway. Gtfoh with this predatory ass bookie