It took them time...
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Social media itself is bad for your mental health. It encourages forming snap judgements using low quality information. Training yourself to use this kind of superficial thought process makes you easier to fool and manipulate.
What’s your approach to news? Do you follow certain journalists or newspapers or something else?
Right now I enjoy Tangle - but I don't obsess on the news as much as most people I know. Focusing more on other interests keeps me saner.
Lemmy has been ok for me. I get on it whenever I feel like it and leave whenever I can't deal with the politics anymore
Edit: grammar
It's much better here without an algorithm, but on the other hand the user base feels pretty ruthless where the blandest opinions net you down votes and angry replies. I only feel safe with jokes and factoids. I think I'm slowly reaching the point where I'll either stop using any online platforms altogether or just 100% lurk.
user's
users'
Attention Everyone.
Grass is green.
Fork found in kitchen.
Water is wet.
Sky is blue.
Thank you for your time.
Social media has the power to do so much good: connecting people across the globe, enabling the sharing of information across language barriers and in circumvention of government censorship, and more. But because the world is run by greedy power-hungry pigs, we can't have social media without it being exploited to the furthest extent possible in the name of profit. The mental health of the public is not even a secondary concern - it is completely disregarded in favor of squeezing further growth out of a saturated market for a service that should be both simple and free.
When television started it had all the same potentials you mention in your first sentence, but by far its main use has been to convince people to buy crap they don't need with money they don't have. And that's how it is now with the internet.
That may be true, but TV also brought me Star Trek TNG, Captain Planet, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and many others that instilled values in me that are core to who I am today. Let's not let perfection be the enemy of progress and keep working to put our tools to better use.
Before all that - and you are right on your take - there is a more basic flaw that affects social media: people do not know how to act properly.
The anonimity emboldens the small minds that use it to mistreat, slander and ridicule others and spread lies and rumours.
Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions - social media will remain what it is: a cesspool where the worst of our species destils into a refined poison.
people do not know how to act properly
They do, in communities where rules exist and are enforced. Anonymity may lead some people to feel more emboldened to act out, but when handled properly I believe the vast majority of them will just settle down and either learn how to participate in good faith or find somewhere else to be. The bad behavior patterns we see in some places are, in my opinion, the result of insufficient social norms and enforcement thereof. This is also a situation capitalists will foster, because it drives engagement and inflates content.
Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions
So you already understand that this is a problem that only exists in places where bad actors are given license to continue acting out.
If I didn't understood there is already a problem of bad actors, I wouldn't have approached your reply. And deny it in any way would be bad faith from me.
What I feel the need to underscore is that individuals make and influence groups and even the most progressively thought out environment is open to being corrupted if any individual present there lacks, in any way, the self awareness that their attitude is damaging.
It's not the group that needs to regulate the individual; the regulation needs to arise from the individual themselves, in the first place. And most individuals lack that hard individual sense of responsability.
See: Manna by Marshall Brain. In his Australia project they simply install a centrally controlled "cutoff switch" - when people are out of line their conscious brain gets switched over to a virtual reality where they can live out their fantasies while their bodies report to detention until their brain decides it wants to join "the real world" again.
That doesn't work. The average individual is too hedonistic to refrain from any pleasureable or self reinforcing loop. It's been a cautionary tale in stories since ancient times.
There's no shortage of people. If the "real world" people all get along with reasonable consensus on what "individual freedoms" mean, and some (hopefully small) percentage of those people decide they'd rather live in an alternate reality where they trample the rights of others, instead of incarceration / punishment / inadequate efforts at rehabilitation, transferring those people's consciousness to a virtual reality where they can "be themselves" would seem to me to be a far better use of their individual spirit than trying to break it or simply terminating it. Maybe most of them never rehabilitate - that's o.k. Of course, this is feeding right into a prequel for Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan.
That is a system predicated on getting rid of the problematic, like the one it exists today, just with an added layer of distancing, to ease the rest of the population's mind. It does not solve any problem.
The inherent problem with freedom in a society is when one person's exercise of their freedom takes away from another person's freedom. Absolute freedom only exists in a society of one person (and, by extension: the more people we have in a resource/space constrained society, the less free we all must be to share the common resources and space.)
If you don't "get rid" of the problematic - what's your option? Just shrug and ignore them when they rape, murder, pillage and destroy? If you "rehabilitate" the problematic, how is that respecting their freedom?
Back in "the Australia Project" (Manna story) - the development of the overall project was kind of vague, but implied access to a lot more "space" in which people could choose to live with others in ways that each group chose to be "acceptable society." If you are more at home in one society than another, you are free to migrate. If a particular society chose to cap its size at 200, or 2000, or however many members, you were free to organize another modeled on it... The key aspect of behavior was: respect. Whatever the size of your social interaction: 2 million down to 2 people - respect the others in that society within the boundaries of local societal norms. The availability of virtual reality expanded the available "living space" many orders of magnitude.
I am going to repeat my point as many times as necessary until it gets through: your example is only a punishment system with an extra layer to be more palatable to the society where it is inserted.
Being free does not imply in any moment an individual can do whatever they may concieve or desire; freedom requires and demands constraint, precisely because the freedom of the other is the boundary of my own. Life in society predicates on this. There is no society of one; the individual often finds a swift end if insisting on it, by its own actions.
A society that simply represses or discards individuals because they engaged in destructive behaviour is not doing anything to in fact solve a problem. A society is as responsible by its individuals as the individuals are by their society. And a society that so simply and easily opts by fractioning itself just to allow more (blatantly artificial) freedom to its elements is not a society. It is something I lack the word to describe but a society it is not.
And I am going to repeat my real-politik question to you explicitly:
What's your grand non-punishment solution for members of society who actively harm other members of society? What to do with those who are non-compliant with "freedom requires and demands constraint"?
A society that simply represses or discards individuals because they engaged in destructive behaviour is not doing anything to in fact solve a problem.
I considered it to be implicit that society would do everything reasonable and appropriate to "solve" the problems of individuals engaged in destructive behavior, but experience has shown: the best efforts in these areas still fail to achieve 100% success. Certainly current societies all over the world (the U.S. especially) could try harder and do better, but 100% success has been historically elusive all over the world.
And a society that so simply and easily opts by fractioning itself just to allow more (blatantly artificial) freedom to its elements is not a society.
And should the entire human race be confined to a single society? Irrespective of our present predicament of cheap instant global communication I would submit: no, there is no one answer for how people should live in society. The one "basic human right" I would proffer to a universal collection of human societies is that: when someone wants to leave one society, they should be free to do so into any other society which is willing to accept them. No society should be under obligation to accept all applicants, but all societies should be required to let people leave whenever they want to, to wherever will willingly accept them.
Sounds like a society that exists only because it tramples the rights of others. Nah, fuck that.
But where's the motivation? How do you join the $10B club "doing so much good"? That would take soooo much longer than just being evil, evil is easy, evil is profitable, and evil can masquerade as good long enough to cash out to a level where you can hire lawyers good enough to never worry about being prosecuted for being evil.
Where's the structural societal incentive to "do so much good", and why would we need it? We are social animals, most of us are hardwired for altruism, we'll do good without expectation of compensation, so our "great society" has chosen to just use those base human instincts to "do good enough" and meanwhile reward the rare psychopaths with wealth and power - because: it's a dog eat dog world out there, if our dogs aren't eating theirs, theirs will eat ours.
Where’s the structural societal incentive to “do so much good”, and why would we need it?
That's a great question. There are some college courses that can help you answer that. The short answer is "because in terms of the flourishing of an entire species, cooperation trumps competition, but it's a recent evolution and doesn't come naturally to everyone". If we are to flourish and advance instead of strangling ourselves in the crib, we need to stop tolerating the kinds of selfish behaviors that prove detrimental to every society that permits them.
we need to stop tolerating the kinds of selfish behaviors that prove detrimental to every society that permits them.
The "why would we need it" question was intended as rhetorical.
I feel that as society grows orders of magnitude larger, these overall detrimental selfish behaviors keep resurfacing as advantages in special niches where they flourish, with the potential as you say to strangle us in the crib.
There's also the looming spectre of mandatory birth control, if the magically predicted end of population growth doesn't happen we're going to have to do something to lessen our resource demands on the planet, because we're already significantly degrading it far more than previous generations with 1/4th and less of our current population which simultaneously made much lower per-capita resource demands...
Yet no one wants to leave social media.
I left it last year and feel so much better. No FB no Whatsapp, no Insta, no Tictok, no nothing.
You’re on a sm rn….
Is this social?
This comment is not the slam dunk you think it is... Lemmy isn't owned by corp interests, it's not algorithm driven and it isn't 92% bots from fascists, oligarchs and foreign influence agencies. You can as much control as you want here. You can talk to actual people here.
Everyone has an agenda. Lemmy wasn’t created for shits and giggles. You don’t really know what’s under the hood, what posts and comments are encouraged, which ones have votes that are inflated. It’s an illusion to think otherwise.
I'm sorry to see comments like this mindlessly downvoted. While I don't agree that Lemmy was built with any ill intentions, this thread results in good discourse.
For example, the platform itself lends itself to be used or abused to promote commercial interests or push one side of a story. The manner in which pro-Russian content has flooded Lemmy shows how the platform itself can be used to manipulate narratives, and there are no doubt many more subtle ways in which the community sentiment is being skewed in ways we might not realize.
I feel like I'm missing something here, but isn't knowing what's under the hood exactly the point of projects like Lemmy? The source is available on github, and they explain the algorithms or talk about their political bias pretty openly in most communities.
Were you thinking more from the angle of the way our social biases work as a group, or like the risk of maintainers tampering with the sauce pre-release?
I hope this didn't come across shitty - genuinely curious.
If open forums on the internet don't have some filtering / steering they all too easily degenerate into YouTube comment sections, or worse. Lemmy seems to mostly be administered with a light touch, but I believe it - even more than Reddit - is sub-moderator driven in terms of what gets removed, what gets allowed.
You can join the Lemmy / ActivityPub developers' meetings via video chat anytime you like. I'm not "into" that level of things but I dropped in a few times just to see what's up - there's a definite axe or two they're grinding, not that they're bad people or out to hurt others at all, but if you don't detect some agenda basis from that crew, you need to think a layer deeper about what those people have been through and why they're doing something to make the world a better place in the future.
Does lemmy do the whole algorithm thing? I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
Algorithmic social media is pretty much what we're talking about, I'm sure.
Of course it has an algorithm, but I think you're referring to an algorithm that includes personalized or demographic parameters.
Regardless of whether the algorithm includes that (or rather, to which degree), let's not forget that bad actors can use the knowledge of the open source algorithm to identify the optimal way to manipulate the platform to bring their content on top.
You are not wrong. It is a social media and TBF the term has been poisoned by many platforms. I think just like drinks there are healthier options. Healthier online community spaces and I’d like to think this place is one of them.
It is an addiction that takes steps of lesser. The place you visit. How long you stay there are steps of management.
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There are lots of us that wanted to leave and did. There are lots that want to and can’t find the will power to do so. It’s definitely addictive. It was hard for me to quit, I have an addictive personality, but I’ve also given up drinking and smoking entirely without councilors or pharma aids. I think it’s time we regulate it like a dangerous addiction until there’s a change to how the algorithms function, which may be never.
In today's episode of "fucking obviously, duh,"... fine-tuned digital brainwashing algorithms do in fact have generally 'bad' effects on the human mind.
Some say they may even be addictive and habit forming!
More at 11!
Y'all, this is one of those articles worth reading right quick. The title is... well, bad. They were looking more at the "quality" rather than quantity of social media usage. The findings were more about the reinforcement of the user's state rather than social media itself being bad. Sure, the algorithm will push things, but your algorithm is primarily gonna push what it needs to keep you engaged with itself, and what you engage with will be influenced by your state of mind/mood. If you're already depressed, you're probably gonna reinforce that via the algorithm. Same deal with positive outlooks. Neuroplasticity and all that.
The researchers also bring up a good point about calling into question the recommendation to limit the amount of time on social media with the idea of mitigating the negative effects. Much like [alcohol] prohibition in the US, a ban on social media usage does nothing to teach us a more wise and healthy approach, nor is it something realistic for the general population.
In fact, if we practice abstention in such a way, those that would use it for malignant purposes would make it worse. I think a good example of that is cryptocurrency. Crypto isn't inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space. There are plenty of useful things we could do with crypto, especially now with the hostile behavior of many currency-issuing states, but since crypto was mostly abandoned by leftist spaces, scams, commodification, speculation, and other hyper-capitalist bullshit abounds in the crypto space.
Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads via unwitting abstention? Or will we take the time to actually learn how to wisely approach the tools we have right in front of us?
Crypto isn’t inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space.
Crypto isn't inherently bad, deceptive pump and dump / Ponzi schemes generally are considered to be bad by those not on the receiving end of the bulk of the funds.
At its outset, I thought it was the left-leaning (non-conservative) spaces that were religiously championing crypto for its' subversion of the financial industry. Of course it wasn't long before the financial industry and traditional grifters learned how to turn Crypto to their usual tricks as a new source of income...
Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads
If you haven't noticed, a lot of people who have a lot of money/power are malignant dickheads, and putting SM-A backed by their type up against SM-B promoted by the "fairness to all, don't hurt anybody" crowd, which one do you think is going to corner 90%+ of the market share: A or B? B just doesn't have the promotional juice (cash) to compete for mindshare.
Howabout this:
All social media algorithms that direct content flow to users are required to be open source, in perpetuity, at least for viewing, so that actual unbiased folks can audit them. Maybe make a new liscense class for this, if need be, so companies can still own the code, but it just has to be publically reviewable.
Would you install blackbox code on your pc?
Well, would you let a blackbox determine what information is fed into your own brain?
Mandate transparency.
That's what Pirate parties advocate for, actually. They do seem to gain back in popularity with the chat control proposal. Problem of the mainstream left parties is that they heavily underrate importance of free software. Underrate to the level of buying iphones, macbooks, subscriptions and so forth. Pirate parties are actually nice step to secure privacy of left-activists in the neoliberal future.
I did not know that, but that entirely makes sense.
I'm American; if we had a 'pirate party' type party, it would be considered a terrorist organization by our pedophile president and his cult of closeted christian racist theocrat morons.
But uh yeah... world economy and society broadly is hugely run by tech and tech companies, you'd think a more nuanced and informed discussion about tech law and policy would accompany that... but nope!
There are Pirate Parties in U.S and Canada. Yet U.S politics are bad asf.
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