this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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That’s particularly scummy of the New Yorker, what I used to think was a pretty great publication.
Although it is true that social media is not good for children, I’m sure it’s not actually killing them.
I'm not sure social media is good for anyone, but I understand that "for the kids" is really the only way people feel confident in regulating anything. But it's all very condescending when the real issue is that social media is causing society to become worse due to Skinner's Box style human impulses -- I do a thing, that gets me attention, so I'll keep doing it regardless of if it's right or wrong.
We shouldn't blame social media as a blanket villain, but simply request that all web services have transparent suggestion algorithms (preferably open source) and provide tax incentives for companies that help promote verified educational content over made up bullshit (as it's the only way to get companies to do the right thing, unfortunately)
I can’t really argue with anything you said. But I will say that in the grand scheme of things that are bad for society and bad for kids, social media is merely one in 1000 different things. You were right about that, too, but I just wanted to clarify my point earlier that I wasn’t just using the “for the kids“ argument. Social media is, indeed, very bad for everyone. Just, particularly, kids.
Of course, I also believe that these things could be improved about social media. It’s just that the profit motive behind social media means that the sorts of improvements to the betterment of society will likely never be explored unless they are the most profitable option.
https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb
This is an excellent article. I was just barely beginning to think (still subconsciously, i.e. still intuitively rather than focused) about leaving Reddit anyway, b/c of all its toxic BS, even prior to the blackouts and Rexodus, when I read this. I could not put it down!!!
But I had to, in order to go to work, and yet I picked it back up again ASAP and kept reading through lunch. And as a result, I gave up my mod position of two subs, left Reddit virtually entirely (though I partially stayed for a couple months to post about Kbin/Lemmy), and came here (the age of my current account does not match up b/c I was first on Kbin).
So yeah, it's long, but like... it PERFECTLY describes what I was intuiting! That Reddit was trying to turn me into a pedantic, narcissistic asshole, by curbing my impulses whenever I wanted to be kind yet encouraging the opposite to let my dark side flow against someone in order to demolish their arguments. Long, detailed answers to someone with specific questions and pleading for answers were penalized, yet short quips like "u suk" got heavily up-voted.
But it's not merely Reddit ofc, it's also Twitter, now X, and FaceBook, and any for-profit social media that prioritizes "engagement", e.g. talking rather than listening. e.g. why is Reddit's search function virtually nonfunctional, and why can each sub only have a maximum of two pinned posts? (I almost started looking into what it would take to write a bot that would allow for a megathread of megathreads, which the native Reddit refuses to provide for, except I could see the writing on the wall that bots were going to be obliterated, so I didn't bother.) Every single time such limitations line up with making new posts, their profits always magically seem to be increased - bc recall that ads are between posts, not between comments, so more posts = moar ads! Even if people stopped responding to people's questions... although usually someone somewhere would at least try, so it increased "engagement" of the type that furthered profits, while decreasing it overall. Hence these items were never going to be fixed.
Hence Reddit was enshittified. e.g. in r/Android people would constantly ignore the begging, pleading, demanding, and threatening from mods to put requests for new phone recommendations into the weekly megathread... and some huge fraction of posts to it were always like "what phone should I buy?", "what Android phone should I purchase?", "Which model phone should I get?" (until they could get removed) - often with no other details given, somehow extremely often back to back, as if nobody else in the whole entire world existed with the same identical damn question, these childish minds (of whatever age) just continually blurted out their requests for attention, spamming the entire world and preventing serious discussions about Android, which basically had to move elsewhere - i.e. the kids got so noisy that the adults had to flee the room looking for a more contemplative quiet.
Which is why we all find ourselves here:-). But even here, the addictive nature of even not-for-profit social media still has its dangers, as too does eating too much food etc., it's not the thing itself (once the profit incentive has been removed) but the amount that can be deleterious.
My goodness, I really hope you feel better. That was quite the blood letting!
Of course, I feel the same way.
But, for me, my quitting point was the mistreatment of Christian Selig, the Apollo developer. That whole crazy bullshit was just so bad for me. I left about that and the whole API thing.
I’d been on Reddit since 2005 or so, and I’d already been through a few “upheavals”, but this was my breaking point. What Reddit had become, at that point, was something I wanted no part of.
I avoided Reddit like the plague for the first decade - I knew that it had the potential to suck me in and I did not want that. But then during the pandemic, I kept finding myself going to it for answers, and then seeing how I could improve things, and then...
I noticed that at work I would say something "snarky", which they did too but even so it's like I was going too far. I typically did not enjoy seeing such things on Reddit, but as a mod I couldn't block most of it without banning the person themselves from the entire community, so I felt that I had to put up with it - and it changed me, but not for the better. I mean not deeply or anything, but it normalized that style, which still was not good. And now for the same reason I've blocked lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - b/c I don't want that to come into myself. I am no fan of e.g. capitalism but "behead all landlords" seems to me a position lacking entirely in nuance or possibly even substance - like "okay Karen, why do you care what I do so much, and are ready to threaten literal violence unless I comply with your wishes?!"
Yes the mistreatment of all the app devs but especially him b/c he was so careful to document it was a big one for me too, though I glazed over that b/c in retrospect I had realized that I had already started thinking along those lines before that happened. Even so, that was the final straw that crystallized it and made me finally move off the platform. A watershed moment in history, for all of us I think. Well, to be more precise I gave up my mod position and went from checking r/popular quickly from like every few hours to only checking in on my former community once a week, then once a month, then... I can't even remember how long it's been now. For awhile I became more active in r/RedditAlternatives than I was in my niche community!:-) But there is only so many times that you can tell someone something before it becomes their choice to not listen, so I just stopped going there at all.
Anyway, the problem is not just Reddit's toxic AF culture (vision, like bullshit, tends to flow from the top to bottom direction in a company), nor even entirely the for-profit model - though each of those has their own, unique bad things that they add into the mix - and in some sense as you alluded to the issue is social media itself. Like candy, it promises good things, and like candy if taken in moderation it can be absolutely fine (especially during a pandemic when social distancing, especially in countries like the USA where "flatten the curve" was somehow taken as a challenge to encourage doing the exact opposite, to "pwn the libs" or sth I dunno), however also like candy it can leave someone unfulfilled if we always turn to the "easy doomscrolling", rather than allow our attentions to absorb longer-form content like say, a TV show, or even movie, or even a fully online & free college course like Crash Course World History.
Social media can wreck our lives! Or it can enhance them, depending on how wisely we make use of it:-).
Save these comments. In 10 years, you’ll be glad you did.