I used to think social media was good because thanks to them, governments couldn’t fabricate false narratives. But it turns out that they are still doing it.
Depends what you mean by social media.
Digital socialization is not necessarily bad.
Easy self-publishing at scale is not necessarily bad.
A marketplace for human attention, where products are optimized for “stickiness” and “eyeball-hours” is bad, but doesn’t necessarily need to be social media. (Buzzfeed comes to mind, and Ricki Lake before that.)
The social media that we ended up with is essentially a chokehold on the means of digital socialization, forcing users to perform for an audience instead of connecting to individuals, and capturing the economic value of that performance as an asset for the platform owners.
We could’ve ended up with something quite different.
Here’s a hot take though:
Products that are built under these conditions will inevitably tend towards a shape that reflects the logic of the market, and they continue to reflect that logic even when financial incentives are removed.
For instance, Lemmy is very Reddit-shaped, and therefore reflects some of the market logic behind Reddit, even after you stick it on the fediverse.
Edit: Barry’s Economics has an excellent video on exactly what sucks about the social dynamics baked into these platforms: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU
Nope. Capitalist social media was a mistake, as a corollary of capitalism being a mistake, itself a corollary of developing hierarchical and authoritarian societies being a mistake.
The Fediverse itself provides an imperfect but serviceable implementation of a liberatory social media. The fact that we are both speaking to each other on proletarian class-conscious (in particular, anarchist) servers demonstrates that social media can be useful to spread class-conscious perspectives, in particular anarchist perspectives in direct opposition to State control.
Aren’t capitalism and hierarchical societies in general a necessary stage of human development?
Unequivocally YES, humanity was much better off before. MySpace was ok, you could make a profile and link with other like minded people, but Facebook quickly turned everything to trash. Constant “sharing” of shit posts has been extremely detrimental to society. Now that it is largely populated and propagated by bots, it’s even more ruinous.
I see many problems with it echoing those of mainstream mass media. Especially with the advent of billionaire-owned social media and the increasing viability of automated posting, we see the same inequality present itself - the richest can pay for bigger microphones and astroturf the place. Even just places like Lemmy and connected tools show what a world of difference it makes to be a little further away from the mass bot armies and the profit motive.
I do believe there are some types of social media which can be constructive, but these are not like the general-audience mass social media we see (facebook/insta/tiktok/youtube/reddit) or even the more direct derivatives, like most of the well-known Lemmy instances. But one must have an idea of why the social media is being made and design it around that purpose. Lemmy is ultimately a reddit alternative. And its most popular communities were/are either bunkers for banned communities or clones of subreddits, hosted on very general instances. There’s no defining vision. It’s an improvement, yes!, but it’s far from what a digital social space can be.
Social media was not a mistake, but unregulated social media was.
The whole incentive for businessman to ‘innovate’ in tech is to skirt around the law. We have had laws about theft for centuries, but now since its ‘digital’ theft we have to write new laws for some reason?
Just an example, but social media/tech unregulated is what got us here.
When governments tried to regulate digital stuff 30 years ago, we got anti-circumvention laws that let corporations put digital locks on everything that are illegal to break. It would be hard to convince me governments regulating social media 20 years ago would have been anything short of a disaster.
I doubt it would have been all that different, because those laws would have been written by the same capitalist class that runs corporate social media today.
Social media was not a mistake, but unregulated social media was.
You’re so right, the open source, non-profit threadiverse would be so much better if bourgeois states censored us.
I agree, the problem is the Sillicon Valley, VC-backed business model. If it was allowed to develop slower and less commercially, what would evolve would have been much less unhealthy for society
Social media run by corporations based on algorithms designed to maximize engagement was a mistake. It may, however have been inevitable.
By that I mean I’m not sure a clever person with a time machine could go back 25 years and prevent it from having roughly the popularity and influence it does now even if someone with a quarter century of future knowledge tried to outcompete it with something that isn’t centralized or optimized for engagement. Those traits were evolutionary advantages over that time period.
social media was unavoidable. there’s just too much curiosity about the novelty. but yeah, it’s questionable today.
Yeah. Giving people palantirs has killed their desire to do anything. Even with this added ability to organize and share info
I have the utopian hope that this is just a matter of circumstances… and how badly off they are. The majority is still doing so well that they can afford to be “apolitical.”
Whats interesting is that social media really took off around the great recession. I think it would have turned out very differently had there been a more Keynesian recovery.
I still say the algorithm was the flaw. Misinformation can be combated with facts, but only if you see the rebuttals.
bots and unlabled echo chambers are the worst parts of social media, along with Zelous Moderators that enforce non-existent rules.
pre-myspace stuff was fine enough. unclear if myspace was ok or not. facebook and later is definitely bad
