Is the problem really social media though? Without some kind of long-distance-capable social medium that we participate in directly, how are we going to know when the news is lying to us? Social media's alternatives also can't resist corruption, if we give up this fight, we'll lose that one too.

I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.

>How are we going to know when the news is lying to us?

On every day of the week ending in 'y'. People did know that before social media I'm pretty sure, and they still do.

You want to know whether something is true? Stop taking peoples word, demand capital 'P' Proof, and infer exclusively based on that proof.

give me an example of anything you can ‘P’rove and I’ll easily ‘P’rove that you are wrong

I exist.

I see no proof of that but I’ll believe someone telling me that you do ;)

I have given an example of something that I can prove, and you have failed to "easily" disprove it. Disappointing given the cockiness of your challenge.

And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)

The challenge was not that you prove it to yourself, Mr. Descartes. It was that you prove it to bdangpublic. It doesn't look like you've done so to me.

You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".

That's moving the goalpost. The challenge was not to prove it to them, but to give an example of a provable thing, them claiming they would be easily able to prove the negative(or to prove that I cannot prove it? The wording is ambigous).

Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun.

But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.

hehehehe exactly :)

short sentence like this is also telltale sign of AI-generated content ;)

Capital P proof is great if you want to know whether a topological space is separable, but if you want to know if you should stop paying your taxes because maybe they're causing more harm than good then you're going to have to rely on something besides capital P proof. You're going to have to rely on induction and probability. More vs less data matters quite a bit in such places.

Sources can include people you've never met, have no reason to lie, and happened to be in an opportune position to contribute to the sort of lowercase p proofs that you need.

If we can fix social media there can be many such people. If not, there will be necessarily fewer, and they'll have to be replaced by people for whom addressing the public with new information is their job. The latter sort are high value targets for corruption. As long as they're worried about keeping that job, they have to also worry about who they upset with their information. You're necessarily going to get weaker lowercase-p proofs from such people.

That's not to say that we'll have no tools for keeping power in check, but we will have fewer, which means their abuses will be more frequent and more severe.

> 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”

Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.

If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.

<< Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.

I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.

Necessary maybe, but insufficient. Shame other plebs all you like, the predatory tech isn't going away until we start ruining rich people over it.

Saying something in a social setting when someone is behaving inappropriately for that social setting is reasonable.

Pulling out your cell phone to post your own angry rants about how your cousins were using social media is just pointless grandstanding.

I honestly disagree. I would like to think I planted some seeds today.

Is Hacker News considered social media, or only sites like x/twitter/mastodon/bluesky?

Interesting point, because Hacker News doesn't serve ads, and doesn't have any personalized algorithms, yet it's quite compelling and I waste a lot of time here.

Everything seems to be social media for a certain age group. Even stuff that I'd call messaging applications.