We could start by calling it what it is -- antisocial. Spending time on media content aggregators is an antisocial activity. Not that spending some time on an antisocial activity is inherently bad... studying and research are also antisocial activities. But let's not call something "social" when it is the antithesis of anything that could be considered as such. I think this could be a decent start!

Antisocial - "when a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others".

I don't think antisocial fits as a descriptor, at all. When I think of antisocial behavior I think of graffiti or arson and other property damage without regard for the owners or the public sphere.

I think the word you're looking for is asocial.

I think it would be one thing if they were just aggregators. It's the community aspect that's harmful - it's clearly addicting and gives people the feeling of being social with fewer of the benefits.

Nextdoor is another example. At least with FB or Twitter, it's a opt-in model -- you have to friend or follow someone to see their posts. With Nextdoor anyone can post to their neighbors, so (at least where I live) many people use it as a soapbox to air any trivial complaint/grump/vendetta to hundreds or thousands of neighbors; I see a lot of toxic flamewars on there.

Ultimately I think social media is an amplifier, taking whatever individual or collective insecurities that were latent, and just projecting them for better or worse.

Disclosure: FB employee but only speaking for myself

Reddit is an interesting one. Since it's an anonymous experience, I guess it'd be the same issues with any internet community. It can be stressful to see seemingly abhorrent viewpoints in such concentrated numbers. And it can be stressful when you feel a community is turning against you, even if your connections to that community are extremely tendentious.

I think Reddit is uniquely harmful to its users in several ways, maybe even moreso than Facebook:

- Users get an intense, one-sided parasocial relationship but with no upside of even communicating directly with each other

- The hivemind effect is very real, and using Reddit often gives people a very false sense of superiority of their knowledge on any given topics

- Misinformation is rife. Even outside of the conspiracy hubs. It's amazing how many of the "front page" posts are often misleading or slanted

- Astroturfing and content farming is even more prevalent but with less moderation.

It's interesting you call relationships on Reddit para-social, I don't know if that quite fits the word because Reddit is more of a two-way reciprocal relationship between commenters. Perhaps Twitter fits that description better since you get a lot of power users like Trump and other celebrities which broadcast out to their followers but don't typically respond to normies.

I think twitter is the most toxic.

I have been uncomfortable on twitter to find enclaves where people are mentally ill, and have found others to exacerbate their behaviour and thinking.

Twitter, at least, is utterly worthless and entirely voluntary. Nobody uses the platform to announce or coordinate family events or to reach out to loved ones when they need help. I have a mostly inactive facebook account in case family messages me on there and I need to help out - I don't have a twitter account because I don't find brigading to be a worthwhile activity. I'd say with a moderate level of confidence that nothing that's announced on twitter has ever been vital to know - if Whirlpool is forced to recall a certain dishwasher brand they'll send out emails and potentially physical letters - no government agent is going to watch them tweet and say "Yup - you just informed the public in a responsible manner".

I completely disagree. There are entire fields of academia where effectively the only discussion being held outside of papers is on twitter.

Twitter, by a large magnitude, has been the most professionally useful social network to me as a knowledge worker/researcher.

Isn't twitter an extremely inefficient way to convey technical information? Why hasn't your specialty broken out a self-hosted forum or even, I guess, a heavily moderated subreddit?

In my, admittedly very brief, experience with twitter, I found it nearly impossible to actually grasp whole conversations. Little snippets and snipes get RT'd to the sky while the main discussion thread gets forced ever downward in the interest sorted feed.

I see toxicity not as twitter’s problem, but as its feature. I go to twitter to find out people’s gut reactions to current events, and in that role it is a uniquely capable and succinct resource.

What you will not find there is rational and reasonable debate, but imho that’s not what twitter is for.

This also exists on FB. If anything, the only reason people are aware of it on twitter is because it's not as much of an enclave as it is on FB.

See, for instance, "cryptic pregnancy" communities on FB, which are definitely hotbeds of mental illness.

What do you define "social media" as? If it's communication kept within circles of family, friends, colleagues, and enthusiast/interest groups, I really don't see much problem with it, just as forums/blogs/etc before it.

The two big problems poisoning this well are:

1) monetization usually reaches for manipulating people's personal socialization stream, and

2) public broadcast of personal content to the feeds of strangers, usually the most inflammatory subset because of point 1.

As long as hackernews hasn't a news feed to keep you invested, as long the damage is negligible.