> I am so thoroughly convinced that social media is toxic for mental health.
The social media business is definitely a toxic, failed replacement for social discourse.
Perhaps young citizens are driven to despair by this and their distress is an early indicator that we are failing as a society to provide adequate education and humanity.
As an adult citizen, I am almost driven to despair.
> I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.
Bingo. I do not believe for a moment that social media company A or B is worsening society. Heck, Facebook links your presumably real identity to your content and people are still disgusting online.
No company will win by not rewarding “interesting content”. We tried that, it was called forums, and they lost out to more “rewarding” communities.
> The scale of content being posted on social media is such that this liability makes running a social media platform effectively impossible.
I won’t miss social media, will you?
And I say this as someone who uses Facebook, YouTube and Instagram quite a lot for Blood Bowl hobby purposes, so it’s not that I dislike their platforms as such, but it’s hard to deny that they aren’t healthy for society. At least not if we want to continue valuing experts and science and not popularity and populism.
> Almost all social networks are garbage and make the world awful and are very bad at their stated goal while being very good at their actual goal, which is creepy, invasive marketing.
I don't think that's much of a contrarian view though.
> I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.
It's very simple once you stop chasing growth and engagement metrics. The main reasons the other social media platforms are cesspools is because outrage generates engagement so the platform is designed to encourage it as well as encouraging users to join and stay regardless of the quality of their contributions, where as here the design itself acts as a small barrier to entry, in addition to a karma system and competent, human moderation that discourages (and eventually bans) bad behavior.
>Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.
What's an example of the anti-social media that fits the mould you seek? BBSes? email groups ?
I agree about mindless repetition of terms like misinformation and censorship. These terms are used to attack political opposition rather than advance any progress.
> Social media has run its course and it's awful. But social media is not and never has been the web, despite their power grabs.
Is this really true? I feel like there are some good social media sites still out there, like certain small parts of reddit and this website we're both commenting on.
> I think the whole point of social media is to connect us to the wider world.
I can't agree with that. I signed up for social media to keep in touch with friends and family, not listen to the crazed rants of their distance acquaintances and marketers. By the time I left, all the actual organic friends and family content was buried by the mountains of irrelevant spam.
I'd totally pay for a service that's limited to only people I care about and know. I can get my outside engagement elsewhere. I want an intimate space, not a town square.
>I mean sure I use this website, so I suppose that counts to some degree
This is a comparison I see a lot, but I really disagree with it. The structure of this kind of website is very very different from modern social media. I will say, though, that I don't have it anymore so I'm going off of how it was in 2018. I'd imagine that the constant feedback mechanisms have gotten worse, and continue to play off of people's anxiety and sense of self in the worst possible ways.
> I don’t understand people who think it’s always been some civil gathering.
In the early days of social media, the idea was to create engaging communities, which I felt for the most part happened. I was on a LOT of social media platforms in the mid aughts and really got a lot of it with the people I connected with. For me, it was actually quite positive and healthy then.
In the last eight years or so? I had to get off. The overwhelming negativity, the weaponization of the platforms, the "cancel culture" and a rash of other things just make a majority of the platforms completely unusable now. On top of that, you add in the incredibly poor track record these platforms have with user data and privacy, the non-stop tracking, and the thousands of ads in your feeds?
It used to be a joy to use these platforms. Now it's gotten to a point where I'm not sure what the point of social media is anymore.
> But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square”
Yes and no. The thing that makes a social media useful (not necessarily good) is the same thing that makes it hard to leave: userbase. Centralization.
I think it would be weird if people __weren't__ upset. You act as if it is easy to make a collective decision to move platforms. I can't get a collective decision in my friend group for where we should go get food and drinks, and that requires far lower consensus and the stakes/effort needed are much lower. People also frequently complain about places they visit in real life, including restaurants they frequent.
> It’s yet another corporate-owned
Btw, being privately owned doesn't mean it isn't a public space.[0] This should be a bit unsurprising when we look around places and how people organize. People go where other people are, full stop. Doesn't matter if it is public or private property (clear example being malls or cafes). Doesn't matter of online or offline. The major difference is we don't treat online spaces as abstracted versions of offline spaces despite them often being built to serve as that exact thing.
> Most people in our circles recognize the social media is marketing for your personal brand
Marketing for your personal brand? What on earth does that even mean? I can’t even imagine what “my personal brand” would be let alone how/why I would market it. Get me out of this narcissism dystopia!
>I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already.
If the only people in my online community are people who are willing to put effort into online communities, that's fine by me. Part of why FB/twitter are so draining/unenjoyable is because literally everyone is there.
Isn't this all social media?
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