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)

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.

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.

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!

Lemmy doesn’t have a neural net prediction/recommendation engine. This is a HUGE difference.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Seriously, read her books. I looooove „The Dispossessed“

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.

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.

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, …

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 magnifies the worst in people.

lemmy does have problems though. Lots of emotional, judgemental and brigading content still. But it’s less here than elsewhere, probably.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

just not as “smartphone friendly” and doomscroll-enabled, due to the format.

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.

They also had protomeme culture before that was a thing - aka “embedded image macros”.

Images, links, enormous smilies’ sets, colored text.