> Why do we think we'll succeed at "detoxifying" the internet?
We won't. Honestly, most people don't want success in any form. They want validation, comfort, and instant gratification. If you have to direct success toward a broad enough group it will never be achieved lest you temper your expectations. This applies to all things. It even applies to choice of career, income expectations, and hiring decisions as well as expecting more mature behavior online.
> Regardless of age / generation, you can't simply speak successs. By definition, that's not how it works. It is a result. A result of decisions and actions. It's not an oversimplify social media post.
After we started to mistake the Internet for reality, this became entirely possible.
> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.
This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like.
The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.
>Maybe I’m an old head, but maybe we need more self discipline in the world?
Quitting and staying off of toxic social media is a great exercise in self discipline.
>>We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections
>Maybe I’m using social media differently, but what is in today's social media that makes it mutually exclusive to real social connections?
That doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive, it means one is overwhelmingly superior to the other, and that the major shift over the past decade has been in the wrong direction.
> I also think overwork is a byproduct of a globally connected society. Humans are happy if they are relatively well off compared to what they know. With smaller societies, we know less and thus expect less from ourselves and our situations. But it becomes more difficult to remain this way as small societies get replaced with large social networks.
This sort of logic is also part of why social media can be so damaging in general. Sites like Twitter, YouTube and Instagram heavily spotlight outliers who've become incredibly successful at their field, which will by definition make many people feel like failures in comparison.
And well, with most people being very image focused and only showing their successes on these sites, it can give the impression everyone else in the world is wildly successful while you're the only one struggling at all.
Still, that's something the internet reinforces in general really. That regardless of what you're interested in or seemingly good at, that there will always be hundreds or thousands better than you at it.
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate.
This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger.
In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations.
What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to "do I enjoy participating".
If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with them etc.
> Here's the thing I try to remember: when life isn't going well for a person, it's easy to turn to the Internet to vent frustration
Yes. It's right there (it takes three seconds to pull a phone out of a pocket), and it's instantly a way to talk to people. Sometimes there's no one else there.
Also, in American culture you're not supposed to be negative in social situations. Always positive, always chirpy. Maybe that is why it's so toxic online. Because similar to the Victorian age and sexual repression, the always-positive leads to a toxic sublimation into Internet anonymity? I'm just tossing this out there as a thought. A counter would be, the entire world is toxic online.
> You had all this before social media. In school I have been made fun of, I have been beaten, people have stolen from me and destroyed my properties. They made pranks, used peer pressure and had huge vanity and popularity contests, while all playing the conformity game..
I think the difference is that social media gives a number by which that your success can be measured.
> social medias just magnify the characteristics of the existing society.
But the problem is that it does in an unnatural way that is prone to various kinds of manipulations. In other words it awards dishonesty. Some examples are posting an heavily edited photo, or not posting something that you want for fear of negative karma etc..
> you don't have the ability to change environment,
I don't know, but it looks like having an ability to change the environment as one wishes will only result in stunned growth..
> The internet can act as a social lubricant of sorts which is valuable. The legacy social lubricant is alcohol.
That is a very interesting point, though I suspect we'll never actually be able to retire that legacy. If we do, I think it'll take at least a century.
Edit: honestly I think the social lubricant is actually pseudonymity, empowered by the network.
> perhaps because I know how to handle it properly
A subset of people seem to share this sentiment. From their perspective, the rest of us are somehow just doing it wrong when it comes to being online. What they never seem to have, however, is a clear understanding of what it's like to be on the other side.
A little vignette: I've been entirely off of social media for about 10 years, as in no accounts. Very recently, however, a friend of mine went on a trip and said the best way to follow along was on Instagram. So, I created an account and followed just that person and one other close friend, who is a fan of posting pics. Straight away, I was bombarded with an endless repeat of advertisements in the feed for some kind of colon cleansing technique. I'm unaware of any problems with my colon, so just ignore it, right? It's not that easy. Now, I have ideas about colon difficulties implanted in my brain. And it's now crossed your mind, too.
Some major forms of digital media insert themselves between me and my friends, rather than simply facilitating communication. In doing so, they hijack the power of human relationships.
It bends people. I'm not sure how else to say it. From where I sit, progress likely means giving up on maximalist capitalism and developing online stuff that strikes a balance between everyone needing to make a living and everyone needing to be cared for as humans.
> Social networks are deliberately designed to be addictive
Social networks are addictive because if they aren't, they fail and cease to be adopted at scale. Somehow we seem to be OK with this happening to ourselves. It is only when it happens to our innocent children that we start to revolt.
> There is something about social media that human beings are not psychologically prepared for.
I would state it: Engineers and business people have distilled what creates craving and then satisfies it by creating more craving.
No different than distilling the sugar, heroin, or cocaine from otherwise healthy, innocuous plants. We regulate some of that distillation. Even what we don't regulate, as a society, we generally look down on people that addict others. Why we reward programmers as we did the Sacklers doesn't make sense to me. I would think we would consider employees and investors of antisocial media companies villainous pariahs.
> Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth
This is an extremely reductive take.
The depressing part about social media isn't just about beauty, it's about success in general. Social media made it very easy to show the image of success without actually being successful.
If you're basing your understanding of reality on social media, you will think that life is extremely unfair to you. Apparently all your friends are always eating at expensive restaurants, driving luxury cars, going on fancy vacations, and getting flowers every day.
This leads to a weird state where pretty much everyone is faking their success, but thinks everybody else's success is real. Which, if you think about, can be quite depressing.
>I'd say the internet helped people be less alienated.
Have you spent much time around teens to people in their early 20's? Social skills no longer exist or most of them. They can't look at you, they can't give you their attention, they can't carry a conversation in person. They stare at their phones, feeling underprivileged because their favorite social media accounts seem to have better, flashier, fancier lives than them so they too highly curate what they show to the world.
As a 34 year old I can look at the generation before me and the generation after me and see a stark difference in social skills.
You used to fall into one of a few groups, now everyone thinks they need to find individuals exactly like them which requires them to search the world far and wide to find someone that identifies as some random string of letters (not necessarily representative of their gender and sexual preferences).
I suspect people in general feel more alienated, more alone, than ever before in human history because of the internet.
Just in the past week there was a thread here on HN about a hair cutting robot and the number of people claiming that they hated having to go to the barber because, God forbid, the barber/stylist might attempt to talk to them [1] was just flat out shocking. They'd rather have a machine cut their hair than have to be around other human beings!
Go out to eat, or go walk around in a populated area (outside or inside). What do you see? People staring at screens, people with earbuds in, throngs of people ignoring each other to interact with strangers on the internet. People sitting at the same table, eating food, texting other people or even texting each other instead of having actual conversations.
Take something like a dating app. Instead of walking up to someone and saying hi, you mindlessly swipe pictures waiting for someone to swipe you back. Then your match tries to find all of your social media so they can quickly see if you are worth the effort of getting to know, instead of actually asking you questions and getting to know you.
> Social media just projects our toxic culture back at us.
When I see Youtube trying to bait me into clicking on videos with disturbing, egregious, disgusting or sexualized thumbnails even though they have nothing to do with the keywords I entered in the search box, I fully disagree. There are also algorithms at play in order to maximise social media site bottom lines.
Some social media do promote and amplify some forms of content, in spite of the user, because it's lucrative to do so for them, otherwise they would not do it.
If you browse the internet without an ad blocker, you'll see these ads on mainstream websites that are optimized for clicks the exact same way.
We won't. Honestly, most people don't want success in any form. They want validation, comfort, and instant gratification. If you have to direct success toward a broad enough group it will never be achieved lest you temper your expectations. This applies to all things. It even applies to choice of career, income expectations, and hiring decisions as well as expecting more mature behavior online.
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