Obviously, “are way worse” means I interpret them that way. I regularly notice how I project the worst possible intentions onto random Reddit comments, even when they might be neutral or just uninformed. Sometimes it feels like my brain is wired to get angry at people. It’s a bit like how many people feel when driving: everyone else is evil, incompetent, or out to ruin your day. When in reality, they’re probably in the same situation as you - maybe they had a bad morning, overslept, or are rushing to work because their boss is upset (and maybe he had a bad morning too). They might even have a legitimate reason for driving recklessly, like dealing with an emergency. You never know.
For me, it all comes back to two things:
(1) Leave obnoxious, ad-driven platforms that ~need~ want (I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has to pay for cat food somehow) to make you mad, because that’s the easiest way to keep you engaged.
(2) Try to always see the human behind the usernames, photos, comments, and walking bodies on the street. They’re a person just like you, with their own problems, stresses, and unmet desires. They’re probably trying their best - just like you.
But at the end I don’t feel a sense of joy like I used to with the old Reddit. Now it feels like a disgusting cesspool that keeps drawing me back with its toxicity.
Edit: this is a skill issue. It’s possible to disable algorithmic suggestions in settings. I’ve done that just now.
Reddit is beoynd toxic, its bordering on violent extremism
Now, because of the algo-juicing home page, both subs are full of each other's people arguing at each other. Cyclists hating drivers, drivers hating cyclists. It's just so awful.
Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway.
It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media.
We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes?
The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real.
I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it.
Bots lower the cost per click so they should have net zero impact on overall ad spend.
Imagine if the same number of humans were clicking on ads but the numbers of bots increased tenfold. Would total ad spend increase accordingly? No, it would remain the same because budgets don't magically increase. The average value of a click would just go down.
The first one is basically great, everywhere I go, when I interact with them they're some mix of pleasant, friendly, hapless, busy, helpful, annoyed, basically just the whole range of things that a person might be, with almost none of them being really awful.
Then I get online and look at Reddit or X or something like that and they're dominated by negativity, anger, bigotry, indignation, victimization, depression, anxiety, really anything awful that's hard to look away from, has been bubbled up to the top and oh yes next to it there are some cat videos.
I don't believe we are seeing some shadow side of all society that people can only show online, the secret darkness of humanity made manifest or something like that. Because I can go read random blogs or hop into some eclectic community like SDF and people in those places are basically pleasant and decent too.
I think it's just a handful of companies who used really toxic algorithms to get fantastically rich and then do a bunch of exclusivity deals and acquire all their competition, and spread ever more filth.
You can just walk away from the "communities" these crime barons have set up. Delete your accounts and don't return to their sites. Everything will immediately start improving in your life and most of the people you deal with outside of them (obviously not all!) turn out to be pretty decent.
The principal survival skill in this strange modern world is meeting new people regularly, being social, enjoying the rich life and multitude of benefits which arise from that, but also disconnecting with extreme rapidity and prejudice if you meet someone who's showing signs of toxic social media brain rot. Fortunately many of those people rarely go outside.