Social Media is dangerous

[cyberfun1 (dizz)]

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?

[Mono The Bun]

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.

[Memory]

oh this, this all exactly.

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

same, and even just the way i talk too.
like on Reddit i see heaps of people mocking me and other people like me, simply because we speak a bit differently.
also it's the same with Vocaloid and Touhou for me - i can't change what i like, the way i am etc; i just wanna vibe with the old-school stuff, which the indie web is quiite a lot more chill for that. social media however is a different beast.

also, i'll spoiler this since it gets into heavy things.

Spoiler

when i was on Discord (around 2022-2024ish) was the biggest time i realised my mental health had been fucked over, especially from a "peer support platform" that actually turned hostile and super dangerous. sucks that platform's still up, and they still say it's good   
anyhoo...

and especially Reddit, it's taken me literal years to process some of the crap i was fed on it.
there's a lot of weird places on it, and honestly if you don't go too far into it, it can be sort of okay. but i went too far into it, of course..

i think the best thing i've definitely gotten from corporate social media at the very least, is that it made me find out i'm queer! it's generally made me discover more of my own identity, but i never felt confident on there.

[close]

so since i've kinda just gotten rid of social media entirely - only using it occasionally for the rare YouTube video or Reddit post from like ages ago, days seemingly go a lot longer, i find myself going into different things like video games and making art instead of doomscrolling etc.

another spoiler, this time about Pinterest..

Spoiler

i also used to use Pinterest a lot, i thought it'd be a good place for some fan art and fan manga and such. ohh lord i was so fucking wrong.

not going into it much here, but honestly anything on there that's "fan art" is usually gonna be absolutely terrible. only because people are desensitised to it. the occasional cute fan art from maybe a very obviously popular franchise might pop up, but... eugh.

really, Pinterest's a nightmare for me. i hope nobody else has gone through the same thing though.
same with every corporate social media, really.

[close]

[WhiteFelineWonder]

Lately I've been starting to grow less and less interested in using or even checking Bluesky. As time goes on and I've been developing my website more and more & drawing in sketchbooks, the initial feeling I had about social media is just not there anymore. Not a lot of things about social media these days seems enjoyable apart from just keeping up with your friends.

I don't have a concrete idea yet but the feeling of wanting to leave Bluesky is slowly in consideration. A bit of a stretch to consider leaving but it's more effective, and at the moment there's still no "reserved" mode.

Anybody else getting this feeling with any kind of social media lately?

[LZI-HRT 13.02]

eeh, i pretty much only use like... twitter to look at funny fake box art and other art these days but i could see why one would stop using bluesky (i myself don't use it much)
i don't even use my main anymore because my timeline is flooded with politics and stuff that makes me very very sad

[Julikins]

Never could "vibe" with Bluesky personally, especially with the influx of the AI kiddies flexing their "probably generated" muscles and the bots being creepy. Even with the small amount of folks I did follow there, I still wasn't convinced to stick around especially after one of the folks on the board is a fan of the AI stuff and NFTs. That felt like a line was crossed at that point, so I deleted mine and never looked back on it much.

I had a few times I wanted to consider making a burner so folks wouldn't make one as a sockpuppet/scammer pretending to be me. Risk outweighed the upsides so I didn't. Even with the only "social" I have left being FB - the rest are either indie ones like Pillowfort or microblogging like Tumblr, I felt like saying good riddance to it...

[elsieee]

honestly I have my fair share of criticism on social media (I mainly use it to connect w irl friends these days) but the main problem is how AI has COMPLETELY INFILTERATED most platforms.

like honestly the thing that pisses me off the most is whenever there's a mildly interesting thread on twitter (yes I still lurk on it once in a while for f1twt stuff) the replies are filled with things like '@grok what does this mean' LIKE STFU AND USE YOUR BRAIN PLS.

it's so ironic that social media was created for human-to-human connection even across remote areas but now it's rapidly losing its humanity.

[Memory]

I kinda feel the same way about youtube it used to be special but now it feels more like TV everyone is trying to hit you with sponserships all the time and the tiny accounts wont even bother engaging with you in any meaningful way I spend my time watching lots of youtube and it just feels like even the good stuff is waseting my time there's just so much out there and its torture to have it dangled in front of my face 24/7 like I could just watch youtube all day and never get bored and that's not how the site should be functioning

Children's content is a far cry from what I grew up with, it's just not even anywhere near as good as what I was watching back in 2013-2017 and that's not to mention all the terrible elsa gate type stuff on there that kids are getting exposed to.

I know everyone uses ad blockers now, but that's really made things worse on there when it comes to ads everything I used to see was pretty much just a scam to phish old people who didn't know any better and that's really toxic and evil, and it needs to stop

Becoming a creator on YouTube used to be fun for people but now its like a full-time job for most people I've seen some people so dedicated to getting a high subscriber channel that they have gone through multiple different channels trying to make it big while some people put no effort in and they can suddenly become micro celebrities its honestly really sad to see

AI has decimated YouTube to an extent that isn't applicable anywhere else online; there's probably like 9 AI-generated videos for every real one

Misinformation is just everywhere and the educational side of YouTube is a constant warzone of a million different videos all on the same subject all trying to be "edgutanment." You can see the same videos everywhere sometimes 

content farms have completely made me lose hope in the system people like moonand turkey tom will put out the most boring draw-out video ever, with practically no soul or care for how massive they are and they will get millions of views being an internet nobody talking about the same things that everyone else is talking about usually with the most lukewarm and unorigonal takes they could possibly ever have they never show their faces or give any indication of who they are as a person they are there purely to make money and that's all they care about I can respect channels like game theory because at least it was only one person at the start and they all obviously care about what they talk about (most of the time) they earned their place and they don't take it for granted and even then its still a content farm

when I Was first watching youtube when I was a kid it always felt like something that I could do like if I tried hard enough then I could make cool videos but now it feels like people are running a business and with all the competition and drama it doesn't feel like anyone can sucssced without trying insanely hard to fill a niche that hasn't been conquered yet its not personal anymore and it will never be personal again and with the amount that I'm watching I should really just quit watching youtbe because its not usable in the same way it was when I Was a kid

oh and ARG's are so overused and have been completely ruined BC now everyone does them to an extent that there is more low-quality ARG's then high quality ones and no one is falling for them anymore because it's so overdone

[Loebas]

Maybe i'm diffrent. But i dont have a problem with bluesky, its fine for me. I have my feeds, and get posts that matter to me.
And that is also what i like about the fediverse. (Mastodon, pleroma, misskey etc.)
I'm actually active on both platforms

Welp, i'm actually writing my thoughts on my weblog now, instead of social media.
I actually wrote a blogpost about this exact same topic.

As for my youtube use. I drasticly decreased it, and i dont really miss everything. I still need to watch the new video's from michaelMJD, ActionRetro, (and i'm in the progress of watching a video from Cathode Ray Dude).

I completley seized my activities on facebook et al. Including instagram.

[Memory]

As for my youtube use. I drasticly decreased it, and i dont really miss everything. I still need to watch the new video's from michaelMJD, ActionRetro, (and i'm in the progress of watching a video from Cathode Ray Dude).

Right, I was being a little pessimistic. I do enjoy most of the channels I'm subscribed to and I should definitely watch a lot less YouTube. I think It's mainly an issue of me not having self-control, and I just end up constantly looking for new videos in my recommended I really need to so search for more reading material on computing and programming so I can actually know what I'm doing I do have that java script thing I never read so that's definitely going to be first when I get the time

oh, and hi Loebas I'm happy to see you here the forum has been really cool so far