[LexiMax]

Social media optimizes for engagement. Maybe some folks are into that...or addicted to it...but I remember a time before engagement was hyper-incentivized, where hanging out someplace on the internet was because you liked the people or the community surrounding it.

Mastodon reminds me a lot more of those old-school internet hangout spaces, like IRC channels and web forums, than it does Twitter, despite wearing its artifice.

If preferring community spaces to habit-forming social media firehoses is somehow cast as "not being able to handle social media," then...guilty as charged, I guess, though it continues to escape me why anybody would consider that a bad thing.

[Karrot_Kream]

I think trying to divide social media into "incentivized" and "non-incentivized" places either takes a lot more rigor than anyone here is doing or is just futile altogether. Even Mastodon is filled with ragebait. I also don't think trying to build an identity around the style of social media you use, the way you're trying to do in your posting, is conducive to good social habits. Do you think creating an us vs them even if it's your your own sense of self is helpful?

[LexiMax]

Building an identity? Us vs them? What are you even talking about? If that was an attempt at trying to reframe this conversation using identity politics - politics you are well aware that HN doesn't handle very well - it was an awfully clumsy one.

I don't see people who are addicted to social media but starving for real social connections as some other side of a debate. I see them as victims of an insidious social experiment created by some of the most anti-social and immoral people on the planet.

Social Media is corrosive to society by design, and I think that we will look back on the era of cramming everybody into one of a few shared social spaces that all go out of their way to anger you people monetary gain as an enormous mistake. But I don't blame the social media users themselves for falling into the trap.

[lynx97]

You are exaggregating. Not everyone has per-se bad experiences with social media. Its a tool, and like with many tools, the user has responsibilities. Hammers are incredibly hurtful if you never learn to not hit your hands with 'em.

I have a FB account since, what, 16 years or so. It has helped me to connect with people, it helped me to partially break out of my (disability-inflicted) social isolation. Heck, it even brought me and my partner of 14 years together. Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well. People are people, and some people are plain assholes. I dont need facebook to be triggered by people.

[LexiMax]

> Not everyone has per-se bad experiences with social media.

Not everyone who drinks alcohol is an alcoholic. Not everyone who gambles is a gambling addict.

> Yes, it also tiggered some rage at some times, but that does normal social interaction as well.

Anywhere can be toxic. The difference is that social media is incentivized to drive engagement, and the way most social media is set up leads to the kinds of anti-social behavior that is rampant on most social media sites these days.

Not all of them. Discord has quietly become the 10,000 gorilla of functioning communities due to the fact that servers are invite-only and moderated by humans, without any populism-driven moderation. Most of the folks I know from the oldschool forum and IRC era ended up there, and I've met loads of new people simply through connections and friends of friends.

[lynx97]

Ha, your first example already shows how lost your cause is. America once tried prohibition, and pretty much gave up on the idea. These days, even though it might be harmful to many, alcohol is pretty much legal in many places on the world. Trying to make it illegal to protect the few that can not deal with it sounds--and actually is--hilarious. Same with social media. So calm down, the train has left the station.

[LexiMax]

Erm, I actually agree with you. Blanket prohibition wouldn't work, and in any case isn't really viable, due to the amount of money in the status quo.

I suppose I hope that future generations will consider social media in its current form to be a vice in the same way that alcohol or gambling are, but I don't claim to know what an actual society-wide solution would look like.

All I can do in the here and now is point out how fake social media is, try and articulate why, and gently guide people who might want off the ride towards spaces where they can connect with actual human beings.

In a way, I feel sorry for terminally online social media addicts. I never understood the appeal of sites like Tumblr, Twitter, or Instagram in the first place. Facebook seemed neat until the artifice of real people + real names + real pictures turned out to be smoke, then I stopped bothering with it. Reddit was probably the closest to being appealing that social media ever got, but it had some serious systemic issues with community-building that only got worse as moderators went from community curators to doing janitorial work for a large company >for free.

[Karrot_Kream]

> Building an identity? Us vs them? What are you even talking about?

I don't think acting indignant rather than trying to reach understanding is in good faith. If we want to raise the level of conversation, we should listen to each other.

> I don't see people who are addicted to social media but starving for real social connections as some other side of a debate. I see them as victims of an insidious social experiment created by some of the most anti-social and immoral people on the planet.

This really condescending. They are addicts and victims. You are not.

> Social Media is corrosive to society by design, and I think that we will look back on the era of cramming everybody into one of a few shared social spaces that all go out of their way to anger you people monetary gain as an enormous mistake. But I don't blame the social media users themselves for falling into the trap.

My point was: I don't think making money from engagement means much, though maybe it exacerbates the existing tendencies of socializing online. Mastodon makes no money but it's often even more toxic than the more widespread networks. I don't think size is the predictor. Lobsters and Bluesky are smaller than HN and Twitter but they both have plenty of toxicity.

I think the point is that once you combine the property of creating an online space disconnected from real life signals and give people a way to stay constantly connected to it (smartphone, always on internet), then reality for these folks erode. I think engagement algorithms can change the incentives on these networks but even a purely chronological forum has the same issues. The reason forums of old were less toxic (and they often were just as toxic, I remember many old flamewars) was just that the participants had to turn off the internet and go outside and interact with the offline world. They could only separate for so long.

[LexiMax]

> This really condescending. They are addicts and victims.

Not everybody who drinks is an alcoholic. Not everybody who gambles is a gambling addict. I was quite specific about who I was talking about.

> The reason forums of old were less toxic (and they often were just as toxic, I remember many old flamewars) was just that the participants had to turn off the internet and go outside.

In my experience, the toxic conversations stopped because a moderator stepped in and gave them a time out, forcing them to touch grass.

And that's ultimately the problem. All spaces can be toxic. Social media sees toxicity and thinks to themselves, "This is drawing eyeballs and engagement. Let's double triple and quadruple down on it.". The incentives of social media are totally maladjusted for creating good social spaces on a fundamental level. Not every old-school social space was run well, but at least the possibility was there and not being actively subverted.

The idea of having user-run social spaces without populism-driven moderation is thankfully an idea that is coming back. Discord has quietly become a 10,000 pound gorilla based on that exact model. I have also found that VRChat is also quietly amassing a following of VR enthusiasts, as it turns out that there is value in maintaining long-distance relationships with a sense of presence you don't get out of group chats and video meetings.

On the other hand, I don't really get the point of BlueSky. It suffers from the same underlying incentives as Twitter, and we all know how that story ended.