Social Media is dangerous

[Yoylecake420]

THIS THIS THIS.

I understand that the phrase "if it's on the internet, people will never forget it" is a strong thing, but people fail to realize this is but a snapshot of a person's life and that snapshot is only but a temporary glime into who they used to be in the past. Same goes for opinions, they change overtime.

People online get so used to how someone acts on the internet before they leave for who knows how much a period of time, and when they come back they're completely different and to those familiar with the old, it's completely foreign and goes against what they believe in to the point they either denounce them or embrace them (most of the time it's the former), OR try and bring up the old stuff to try and chase them off again.

People are adverse to change if they become comfortabe, forgetting it's neccessary to grow, social media has made it so that stagnancy is good, change is evil. And if something changes, chase it off with what they used to be and ignore the fact the person MIGHT be self-improving or no longer like that.

I can understand if this stemmed from the roots of chasing off people who had shown patterns of being awful online but it's gotten to the point it's being abused GREATLY to a detrimental effect.

I agree. I've been harassed and mocked on the Internet due to my interests and actions.

[DiffydaDude]

https://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/design/persuasion.text I found this interesting document. Turns out, a lot of the things that happen on social media were being observed in 2001 online, including things like "liking" and wanting validation

[Bakartridge]

I've kinda been weaning myself off social media the past couple months, it's both way too addictive and basically does nothing but make me angry. I deleted my Reddit back in November and I've used Twitter and Bluesky WAY less, the most is I just browse one or two pages for a bit then close the app/tab, instead of browsing for hours like I used to. The only social media I really use is Tumblr but even then I really don't use it for socializing, at most I just use it to look for cool art and to post my random thoughts I do (and to post my drawings but I upload them to a bunch of places anyways :P), the only social media I've used in the past few years that I really "like" is SpaceHey, and even then it's not really a traditional social media like those other platforms.
If it counts there's also Discord and Telegram which I've been using less, they're good for finding niche communities to talk in but even then I only really gravitate towards 3/4 specific communities even though I'm in like, dozens of places. I honestly find Telegram to be a worse example of that as from personal experience I don't really like most of the communities I've been in for a combo of reasons, mainly just disliking the people in them, aside from the aforementioned 3/4 specific communities I gravitate towards.

[cmdr_nova]

I feel like it's complicated. Like, on one hand, social media is the reason I survived 5 years of isolation. On the other hand, a lot of social media is currently being used by dictators and fascists to manipulate the narrative and the masses. On the other hand, that's really only an issue on corporate social media, which is easy enough to get away from, and stop using.

I think the internet and social media is what you make it, and that one way to make it better is to stay away from algorithmic social media.

[StrawberrySys]

To be honest. I need serious help breaking free from New Web. I create YouTube and twitch content and I am chronically on discord. I seriously do need some support to get back to basics. Could anyone link me some resources?

[Monoki]

My first breakaway from social media was with Twitter, several years back. At this point, I had become fairly disillusioned with my own creative worth. I no longer felt like I could create the things I wanted to create, because they were not "trendy" nor fit a popular aesthetic. And I'll be honest, as a certified windbag, 140 characters...just never felt like enough, to create meaningful connections. On a more sinister level, that sort of brevity seemed often to only fuel misunderstandings or long-winded fights. I never got personally involved, but having to watch my feed become inundated by those kinds of interactions...it was very easy to be put in a foul mood. The largest "wake up" moment was realizing every other post in my feed were promotions or tweets from people I didn't follow or even liked, and that the content I actually wanted to see was no longer within my control. This platform no longer was serving me in a manner that was healthy, so I went cold turkey and never looked back.

Sometime around the recent U.S. Election I took a break from Twitter for about 3 weeks or so. Nothing having to do with the election itself so much as i was feeling especially down and tired of Twitter that day. Came back for a little while after the three weeks but then decided to get off Twitter again at the beginning of February. I haven't really been there much since. Probably only about three or four times. I post and ghost whatever little creative things i have. Honestly thinking that I might just stay off the site altogether. It's a madhouse and chances are the algorithm nerfs people from seeing my work anyways.

Also, I feel it's forced me to elaborate less with it's character limit. So starting off coming here, I had to work a bit at writing a paragraph to expound on my thoughts as opposed to trying to compress all my thoughts down to a small word count. In some ways I feel all social media forces you to be brief. But twitter especially so.

[BlazingCobaltX]

Again, that’s the thing that some of Haidt’s detractors fail to mention. His book and other writings specifically points to the destruction of performance-free (no metrics and no trophy) third spaces for children, including and especially playgrounds, as major factors for the rise of mental illness in children. One of his co-thinkers (they correspond) is evolutionary psychologist and child development researcher Peter Gray, and I see Haidt’s book an extension of Gray’s Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (in fact Haidt recommends Gray’s book in Anxious Generation). Interestingly, it feels like most opposition to Haidt is based on “social media-size bites” that focus exclusively on some clickbait title about Instagram, instead of the arguments he actually presents in his book.

I did my due dilligence and read all of Anxious Generation. Well, after the chapter on spirituality I started scrolling skimming. Since this thread is not about this book specifically I will spoiler my response, but I feel strongly about presenting this book as what it really is: A bunch of misconstrued arguments for an otherwise fair hypothesis, carried by a false sense of authority the author pretends to have on these topics.

Spoiler

My most important rebuttal is to the graph in the first chapter about unemployment and rates of depression, which you also shared in an earlier post. Unless you read the text underneath the graph (not included in the image you shared), you will miss out on the vital detail that the two statistics do not come from the same census. What Haidt did here is pick two unrelated (or rather: unmatched) statistics and point out that they - indeed - are unrelated. A proper way to address the unemployment --> mental health hypothesis would be to look at studies of parent-child dyads, of which the parents either were or weren't affected by unemployment. That is the way to disentangle these two very global phenomena from other factors and look at their relationship in isolation. By throwing two global trends together in a graph without any sort of participant matching (impossible), the graph is essentially saying very little. This is his singular argument for rejecting a pretty plausible hypothesis.

This example is the most striking of what Haidt does repeatedly throughout this book. He picks population-level demographic data and draws conclusions from them, without consulting any sort of significance testing. Yeah, he cites some good studies, but he throws it together with utter trash like the above example (plus a load of anecdotes?). And regarding the studies used, it's interesting that most of the nuance about those are relegated to the footnotes rather than in the text itself, where an actual nuanced back-and-forth should have been had. Throughout the book it is clear that Haidt is dead-set on his initial hypothesis and only very briefly considers alternate hypotheses, only to reject them entirely without applying the appropriate level of scrutiny. From an academic perspective, the statement "There is just no way to pin the surge of adolescent anxiety and depression on any economic event or trend that I can find." is utterly laughable.

I know this is pop science, but Haidt is a published academic researcher and that makes these kinds of obfuscations even worse in my book. What's worse, his complete focus on proving one single hypothesis of his makes him ignorant of other tangible effects of phone usage, such as the phenomenon of "phubbing". This could have been a very good compilation of all the substantial proof of smartphones/social media being harmful to our lives, were it not that Haidt had already constructed his vision before even writing this book.

(That said: Nothing wrong with his explainers on child development, but you can tell he first wrote his main thesis and then compiled all the evidence in his favour, rather than the other way around.

[close]

Back to the main topic: I think the risks of social media exist in tandem with the evolution of smartphones. Social media would not have grown to be like this if we didn't get to have personal computers on our self the whole time, able to interrupt what we're doing at any moment. You can always tell a phone-first site or app is designed to maximise engagement, whereas computer-first sites have not adapted that philosophy to an equal extent. I implore everyone to use their preferred social media on browser for a while and see what happens.