Taking the time to save a link/picture, go to another site, and typing in a description and comments on material? Great. Seeing a cat picture and instantaneously clicking "share"?
Screw that. That kind of behavior is in the website's interest, not mine. It creates an endless stream of slightly-interesting material from people I know, just enough to keep me watching but not enough to feel like anything got done.
Spending time doing something compulsively that later you realize was a waste of time, then doing it again? That's addiction. I don't know what kind of addiction it is. It's certainly less addictive than opiods. But it's no doubt addictive -- and it is currently affecting billions of people worldwide.
It's an amazing amount of societal damage that nobody will ever be able to quantify. We'll never know the books that weren't read, the inventions that weren't made, or the people that weren't helped because somebody was watching social media.
(And before somebody talks about how great it is to have the planet connected, it is! Being able to communicate and research is nowhere near the same thing as having your head stuck in your phone eight hours a day)
Individuals have a right to recreation; they don't need to spend every waking moment being useful to society. The alternative is dystopian.
Is social media better that TV? I would say social media has more value and is more likely to cause damage, but avoiding both is probably a good idea. I try not to eat much ice cream either.
Every minor thing is "breaking news!" and needless drama stirred up to keep you watching, in between the half a dozen tickers and counters on the screen with pointless metrics to look important and soak up your attention.
This. If nothing else scared me away from social networks the mind-numbing scroll-like-scroll-like behavior I see the users/addicts exhibit sure does.
Take Instagram. It used to be a platform for posting pictures. It was a digital version of Polaroid—an “instant” camera. When you look on Instagram now it’s core functionality and differentiation is basically gone. When you look on the explore tab you are hard pressed to find any photos at all, let alone ones that were taken with the camera itself.
Instagram now is no different than Facebook or any other generic network, it’s just the biggest. The content is nonsensical and people will eventually get bored of it. At some point I think it occurs to every user, “why am I even doing this” and they bounce, so it always requires new users coming in to grow the userbase.
IG is now easy, from a technical standpoint, to replace as it has no real identity. Just let people post whatever for internet points. Socially it’s hard to topple, but that’s hard to defend long term and somewhat out of your control.
I just don’t see how or why IG exists ten years from now. For what? At least in its original incarnation it had a purpose, however niche, which might have had some long term viability.
I think the best example of this is probably looking at the Chinese social apps like YY, Inke and Meipai. A billion people who don’t give a shit about Kylie Jenner and are developing apps with far more interesting features than anything we have.
Granted, there are accounts that are dedicated to memes and other ‘nonsensical’ content, but you get much more of that on FB. Putting IG in the same trash pile that FB is in is unfair.
It’s nuanced, but fundamental different from the photo sharing sites that came before it like Flickr.
The share button may as well be replaced with “Promote” because that’s what it is.
https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ https://bengrosser.com/projects/instagram-demetricator/
Whether or not that communication between individuals is high-quality will vary from person to person, though.
> ... completely different than they way they are used today.
Are you conflating the way that you would interact with a social media site, and the way that most people would -- rather than comparing both sets of people over time?
TFA's focus is on the addictive aspect of FB (etc) -- and clearly FB (etc) are constantly improving their psychological toolkit in order to obtain and retain eyeballs -- but I don't think the quantifying of likes is the main tool in their kit. Worse, they're not likely to voluntarily reduce the efficacy of their methods.
I administer a large-ish group where respectful discussion is non-negotiable. It works, it serves it's purpose.
I think "good moderation" is basically the answer for toxicity.
pun intended
> ways I used Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the early
> days and they were completely different than they way they
> are used today. They were personal, real time, and no one
> cared about “likes”.
Yup, also when considering how this all evolved. Before that there were Newsgroups (mega techy) and various online forums/chats. They were a little trashy but people were very engaged. On the other hand pseudonymity was omnipresent, Facebook was the first big one to change that. Now there are far more users and far less online communities.
I think a lot of the problems with social media today could be solved just by removing “the numbers.” If suddenly all the like, follower, following, and comment counts disappeared I suspect people would use these things fundamentally differently. I see people browsing through IG tapping to like for 20 minutes at a time and think to myself, “why are you even doing that?” It’s a compulsion that does nothing.