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Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow
(www.newindianexpress.com)
Shuunnnnnnn
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Technology
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Shunnnnnn… shun the non believers charlie
Shunnnnnnnununnnnnnn
Shun magic and shun the appearance of magic! Shun everything and then shun shunning.
By 2025 it will all be chatbots posting disinformation for the enjoyment of other bots, while advertising bots pay for it.
X for doubt. Remember, users had no reason to sign up for a Facebook or Instagram account in the first place. Users just willingly gave information away to these evil corporations at will. I could very well see the future of the Fediverse growing. The past few months of using Lemmy and scrolling Mastadon has been amazing.
I feel it has already happened.. people check social media, but I hardly see any created content anymore (status updates etc).. just reposted stuff from gullible people that they thought was magic but was just AI created rubbish.
The only thing I use social media for is purchasing items from hobby groups and I can’t see that being replicated anywhere anytime soon as eBay is full of fake rubbish
The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own -- in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I'm talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salts form crystals. It's just in their nature.
The thing with circlejerks isn't that there's overwhelming agreement on some subject. You'll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the Earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts "glory to the cause" in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post "2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause" and get 400 upvotes.
Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it's just them and the upvote button and "do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings", "is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else" -- the true colors show. It's depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn't for you.
How much is it currently, 90%?
And as a result the echo chamber will be even louder for everyone believing the bullshit. Bill Gates should hurry up and activate the brain chips.
I did it 3 years ago and have not looked back! I do miss keeping up with some friends and Facebook events are nice but the toxicity just got to be to much
What do you think this is?
Yep. This is the primary thing preventing me from contributing to, and recommending Lemmy. People confidently posting and upvoting harmful misinformation, and toxic/unintelligent people. I've already left Reddit and Facebook (a long time ago) for similar reasons.
I think that number will grow as Twitter continues to decay. People clinging to the dead corpse is pretty cringe when it comes to Twitter.
Facebook is dead already I feel and most people I know using it are only in there for old people who can’t use anything else or for the marketplace. Under the same umbrella, instagram is dead unless you’re selling something.
Forums like Reddit and lemmy I think will last the longest, but even then when the toxicity grows and transfers over from Reddit to here I probably will stop using it as much
Also I say dead as in what it originally was has been lost in the wake of “influencers” and companies
It's a shame, facebook used to be great for local stuff, but the algorithm seems to have killed that.
Tried nextdoor but it's mostly Karens.
What's next-door?
I'm just now reviewing ancient comments and replies of mine. If you haven't found out already, think of a site that's similar to Facebook, but instead of making "friends" as the big draw, it's all about your neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods. So it's filled with people asking about where to find "cheap reliable (insert service here like landscaping, drywalling, etc)", suspicious people seen around the place which another commenter mentioned, so given the very white, very Karen-like audience is probably just a notice that some racial minority person was here. Like I mentioned, lost pets are a common post, there was recent 2 different companies going around digging fiber lines for Internet service, and then the predictable "has anyone switched, how do you like it?" type posts that follow.
A lot of these people don't know each other, so their only common ground seems, at least where I am, to be mostly just where they physically live, and the fact that they all love Trump.
This is as close as I get to social media.
Fuck I literally thought that comment word for word before I loaded the comments for this post.
We are all DigitalFrank on this blessed day.
This reminds me of an interesting dynamic I've witness this holiday season.
Now, to set the stage, most of my extended family and friends know well that I don't do social media. I left Twitter way back when it was just becoming necessary to grapple with the idea of the blue check, and Trump was still just some reality TV guy with cartoon hair the last time I made a Facebook post. I never got Instagram, TikTok, or any of those 2nd run of social media apps.
Everyone who knows me knows this about me. But this year when I talk about actually deleting my Facebook, people are aghast. No one is bothered that I haven't posted there in a decade, but me actually deleting my account is something more akin to actual death to a lot of these people. I don't get it.
I already shunned it. For about 4 years now. I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
You really don't realize that lemmy is social media? You really don't realize that toxicity and misinformation is rampant here?
That's true.