Yet no one wants to leave social media.
I left it last year and feel so much better. No FB no Whatsapp, no Insta, no Tictok, no nothing.
You’re on a sm rn….
This comment is not the slam dunk you think it is… Lemmy isn’t owned by corp interests, it’s not algorithm driven and it isn’t 92% bots from fascists, oligarchs and foreign influence agencies. You can as much control as you want here. You can talk to actual people here.
Everyone has an agenda. Lemmy wasn’t created for shits and giggles. You don’t really know what’s under the hood, what posts and comments are encouraged, which ones have votes that are inflated. It’s an illusion to think otherwise.
I feel like I’m missing something here, but isn’t knowing what’s under the hood exactly the point of projects like Lemmy? The source is available on github, and they explain the algorithms or talk about their political bias pretty openly in most communities.
Were you thinking more from the angle of the way our social biases work as a group, or like the risk of maintainers tampering with the sauce pre-release?
I hope this didn’t come across shitty - genuinely curious.
If open forums on the internet don’t have some filtering / steering they all too easily degenerate into YouTube comment sections, or worse. Lemmy seems to mostly be administered with a light touch, but I believe it - even more than Reddit - is sub-moderator driven in terms of what gets removed, what gets allowed.
You can join the Lemmy / ActivityPub developers’ meetings via video chat anytime you like. I’m not “into” that level of things but I dropped in a few times just to see what’s up - there’s a definite axe or two they’re grinding, not that they’re bad people or out to hurt others at all, but if you don’t detect some agenda basis from that crew, you need to think a layer deeper about what those people have been through and why they’re doing something to make the world a better place in the future.
I’m sorry to see comments like this mindlessly downvoted. While I don’t agree that Lemmy was built with any ill intentions, this thread results in good discourse.
For example, the platform itself lends itself to be used or abused to promote commercial interests or push one side of a story. The manner in which pro-Russian content has flooded Lemmy shows how the platform itself can be used to manipulate narratives, and there are no doubt many more subtle ways in which the community sentiment is being skewed in ways we might not realize.
Does lemmy do the whole algorithm thing? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong.
Algorithmic social media is pretty much what we’re talking about, I’m sure.
Of course it has an algorithm, but I think you’re referring to an algorithm that includes personalized or demographic parameters.
Regardless of whether the algorithm includes that (or rather, to which degree), let’s not forget that bad actors can use the knowledge of the open source algorithm to identify the optimal way to manipulate the platform to bring their content on top.
Fair. Have you seen an example of this?
In my limited imagination, bots that flood a topic has a tendency to do that. The the “ask reddit” bots I see in “All”.
Yes, browse https://lemmy.ml/c/memes.
The entire community is run by Russian trolls who take the following approach:
- Engage with anybody even remotely critical of the extremely pro-Russian posts, under the guise of being “modern-day communists”
- Parrot and inflate anything that resembles far-right movements in Ukraine
- Repeat all the Russian propaganda, such as describing the Ukrainian government as fascist
- Misconstrue comments and incorrectly extract quotes
- As mods, selectively delete comments to create a one-sided, pro-Russian narrative
- Gang up with all their troll accounts onto a comment they deleted, chiming in with “wow, fascist” to make the casual observer believe that message must have been awful and they are the good guys
What is that?
sm = social media
Is this social?
Lacks self-awareness, along with everyone upvoting them lol.
Self awareness is very challenging, you will always have blind spots.
Yes, and… it’s a skill that needs to be practiced. We don’t call it out as a skill, we don’t recognize it as a skill, and we don’t tell others that they need to practice it. So we get stupid shit like people saying they don’t do social media, on social media.
The world would be a much better place if we prioritized self-awareness as a universal skill.
There are lots of us that wanted to leave and did. There are lots that want to and can’t find the will power to do so. It’s definitely addictive. It was hard for me to quit, I have an addictive personality, but I’ve also given up drinking and smoking entirely without councilors or pharma aids. I think it’s time we regulate it like a dangerous addiction until there’s a change to how the algorithms function, which may be never.
In today’s episode of “fucking obviously, duh,”… fine-tuned digital brainwashing algorithms do in fact have generally ‘bad’ effects on the human mind.
Some say they may even be addictive and habit forming!
More at 11!
Attention Everyone.
Grass is green.
Fork found in kitchen.
Water is wet.
Sky is blue.
Thank you for your time.
Y’all, this is one of those articles worth reading right quick. The title is… well, bad. They were looking more at the “quality” rather than quantity of social media usage. The findings were more about the reinforcement of the user’s state rather than social media itself being bad. Sure, the algorithm will push things, but your algorithm is primarily gonna push what it needs to keep you engaged with itself, and what you engage with will be influenced by your state of mind/mood. If you’re already depressed, you’re probably gonna reinforce that via the algorithm. Same deal with positive outlooks. Neuroplasticity and all that.
The researchers also bring up a good point about calling into question the recommendation to limit the amount of time on social media with the idea of mitigating the negative effects. Much like [alcohol] prohibition in the US, a ban on social media usage does nothing to teach us a more wise and healthy approach, nor is it something realistic for the general population.
In fact, if we practice abstention in such a way, those that would use it for malignant purposes would make it worse. I think a good example of that is cryptocurrency. Crypto isn’t inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space. There are plenty of useful things we could do with crypto, especially now with the hostile behavior of many currency-issuing states, but since crypto was mostly abandoned by leftist spaces, scams, commodification, speculation, and other hyper-capitalist bullshit abounds in the crypto space.
Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads via unwitting abstention? Or will we take the time to actually learn how to wisely approach the tools we have right in front of us?
Howabout this:
All social media algorithms that direct content flow to users are required to be open source, in perpetuity, at least for viewing, so that actual unbiased folks can audit them. Maybe make a new liscense class for this, if need be, so companies can still own the code, but it just has to be publically reviewable.
Would you install blackbox code on your pc?
Well, would you let a blackbox determine what information is fed into your own brain?
Mandate systemic transparency.
That’s what Pirate parties advocate for, actually. They do seem to gain back in popularity with the chat control proposal. Problem of the mainstream left parties is that they heavily underrate importance of free software. Underrate to the level of buying iphones, macbooks, subscriptions and so forth. Pirate parties are actually nice step to secure privacy of left-activists in the neoliberal future.
I did not know that, but that entirely makes sense.
I’m American; if we had a ‘pirate party’ type party, it would be considered a terrorist organization by our pedophile president and his cult of closeted christian racist theocrat morons.
But uh yeah… world economy and society broadly is hugely run by tech and tech companies, you’d think a more nuanced and informed discussion about tech law and policy would accompany that… but nope!
There are Pirate Parties in U.S and Canada. Yet U.S politics are bad asf.
Crypto isn’t inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space.
Crypto isn’t inherently bad, deceptive pump and dump / Ponzi schemes generally are considered to be bad by those not on the receiving end of the bulk of the funds.
At its outset, I thought it was the left-leaning (non-conservative) spaces that were religiously championing crypto for its’ subversion of the financial industry. Of course it wasn’t long before the financial industry and traditional grifters learned how to turn Crypto to their usual tricks as a new source of income…
Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads
If you haven’t noticed, a lot of people who have a lot of money/power are malignant dickheads, and putting SM-A backed by their type up against SM-B promoted by the “fairness to all, don’t hurt anybody” crowd, which one do you think is going to corner 90%+ of the market share: A or B? B just doesn’t have the promotional juice (cash) to compete for mindshare.
water is wet, fork found in kitchen
cat found on keyboard
Social media itself is bad for your mental health. It encourages forming snap judgements using low quality information. Training yourself to use this kind of superficial thought process makes you easier to fool and manipulate.
What’s your approach to news? Do you follow certain journalists or newspapers or something else?
Right now I enjoy Tangle - but I don’t obsess on the news as much as most people I know. Focusing more on other interests keeps me saner. In general I think it’s healthier to have a couple news sources you peruse, rather than a “feed”. You look at items that interest you and then you’re done - like in the days of newspapers, when people would read what they wanted and they’d be finished with the paper. I think that sense of completion is important to mental health. You don’t get that from a feed because a feed is never empty.
Lemmy has been ok for me. I get on it whenever I feel like it and leave whenever I can’t deal with the politics anymore
Edit: grammar
It’s much better here without an algorithm, but on the other hand the user base feels pretty ruthless where the blandest opinions net you down votes and angry replies. I only feel safe with jokes and factoids. I think I’m slowly reaching the point where I’ll either stop using any online platforms altogether or just 100% lurk.
Again!
IDK how many times I’ve seen similar headlines. But it’s a lot.A simple google search shows me more than 5 studies already on the first page.
No shit!
I’m shocked! SHOCKED! Well…
It took them time…
deleted by creator
user’s
users’
You mean making it seem like a person’s world is all a giant terrible feedback loop of things that cause them outrage is a bad thing? Whodathunkit?
Why isn’t methodology discussed anymore? How were their conclusions reached? That was always a big part of newspaper reporting back before the internet. Methodology is important. Without it, conclusions are as useless as any other “polling” data. It may be in the linked article but I look to the post only for good, or incomplete, information. I don’t click on the links.
You had me in the first half.
You’re not wrong, but this is a press release from a university about research. They’re not going to dig into methodology when they want to toot their own horn.
Reading the abstract and introduction (full article is pay walled), it was a pilot study using EEG. Normally similar studies have participants self report using a survey. Sample size was 60 people which seems reasonable given they had to hook up each person to an EEG. Demographics are a bit skewed based on gender and age, but as a pilot, that probably isn’t that big of a deal.
I’m not seeing anything egregious, and it was published in a peer reviewed journal. I would treat this as a single data point and wait for other researchers to replicated it and prod at the methodology more.
… that’s kind of silly. The methodology is indeed in the article. Why would you expect the internet to behave the same way as a newspaper? If you care about the methodology of the study, why wouldn’t you just read the article anyway?
However, I do think you at least have a point about how these aggregate feeds work in relation to how information is presented/understood. The post here is a good example of the title being a woefully inadequate descriptor of it’s content, despite being generally ‘fine’. People would probably draw inaccurate conclusions upon only reading the title, but like, we’re already pretty aware of this phenomenon by now, aren’t we?
