[winterismute]

I always thought linking all the main things not working in the actual world to the alienation caused by too much digital consumption to be wrong/not really making sense. However, gradually, I am getting closer and closer to that conclusion... In your case, what brought you to the stance "Too much social media is what ails the whole world"? What do you think we could do to solve it?

[wongarsu]

Social Media used to be better when you actually had a connection to the other person. Nowadays it's mostly anonymous or parasocial. All social media sites have drifted to influencer content (TikTok, Meta, Youtube) or to moving the identity of the other person to the background (reddit, HN). The inbetween of early social media with smaller groups of people who know each other has gotten very rare

The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues

[whstl]

Bingo. In a nutshell: parasocial relationships doing psychological and financial damage; anonymous inflammatory content doing social damage.

And that’s without putting things like dating apps, advertisements and privacy violations in the mix.

[Noumenon72]

Are you sure this isn't an Eternal September thing where the initial organizers were just an early-adopting minority, now overrun by a majority that actually has broad consensus on many issues? Also, do you actually have any evidence of bot effects? Would you be able to unleash a bunch of bots on Bluesky and make it seem to have a consensus on tariffs being a good policy?

[Aurornis]

If you go back in history you can find examples of people making the same claims about too much television. Prior to that, too much radio. Prior to that, too much newspaper consumption.

A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.

This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.

[korse]

Did you ever consider that all the concerns regarding the negatives of new media might have some truth to them?

Technology is advancing much faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.

Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?

[thegrim33]

So, because some people in the past made (to you) incorrect arguments about something, that means anyone in the future making a remotely similar argument automatically has to be wrong? People in 2025 discussing social media have to be "wrong" because some subset of the population supposedly (to you) made a bad argument about radio 100 years ago?

[billfor]

All of that is broadcast / one direction. Social media is two-way. We've never had two-way mass communication. The rate of communication was an order of magnitude different also.

[anigbrowl]

That doesn't make those claims invalid. Too much television is also a problem, and a lot of television content is junk. Tabloid newspapers are a scourge, as are opinion writers whose output often consists of fallacious propaganda designed to maximize confirmation bias.

[immibis]

They were right.

[AngryData]

In what ways? What things would be better without TV and radio? You think they would be more informed? Or harder to manipulate?

People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?

Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.

To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.

[areoform]

As the other user said, people have been warning about new forms of media since the invention of writing. It has always been in vogue to be a nay sayer.

But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.

You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.

Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.

And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.

Garbage In. Garbage Out.

Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.

[dingaling]

You can still change the channel, it turn it off.

However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.

[throawaywpg]

Get people hooked on local solutions and local social networks that exist "IRL."

[winterismute]

Ok, but how could we do that? Especially since thing like eg. work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote...

[robotnikman]

>work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote...

I wish this were the case so badly... it seems to be more the opposite with many companies doing RTO now.

[throawaywpg]

organize things offline. political stuff, social stuff, hobbies, exercise. The things that people want, that online life isn't providing. I can't see another option other than waiting until tech is so commonplace that the advances don't interest people anymore.