[hermitcrab]

New social trends and technologies frequently cause some level of moral panic. Moral panics of the past have been caused by all sorts of things, that now seem rather quaint: novels, bicycles, comics, television, videos, heavy metal, dungeons and dragons etc. But social media feels very different. It really does seem to be causing major societal disruption.

[tardedmeme]

So did all those other things. And many of them did cause major societal disruption. And most of those were for the worse.

[hermitcrab]

>And many of them did cause major societal disruption.

Which ones?

[tardedmeme]

Printing press ("novels"), bicycles, television, videos. Half the video games today trace back to dungeons and dragons so that was disruptive too.

[hermitcrab]

I'm not convinced that bicycles, novels and dungeons and drags were major societal disruptions. The printing press certainly was.

[wffurr]

Social media is more like the printing press than any of those things. It radically changed the economics of distributing information. The printing press brought down the Catholic church and the Kings of Europe. The disruption caused by social media and disintermediated free distribution is just getting started.

[krige]

You may notice that both the european kings and the church coexisted with the printing press for centuries. No, what did the kings in was the great war, and what broke the Catholic Church's stranglehold on Europe (because it's still around and hardly powerless) was either the french revolution or the great war again.

[TFNA]

Notice much Catholic Church power in Northern Germany and the Nordic countries? The printing press was a huge part of how Northern Europe went so hard for Lutheranism that Catholicism became a vague folk memory. Around the same time, Great Britain and the Netherlands became mostly Protestant, and even France had a substantial Protestant community before the Counter-Reformation was set on it. This is what the OP was talking about.

[krapp]

The current social panic always feels very different. But people literally believe social media is the sole cause of all of modern society's problems, that it's a mind-control platform and a cancer on society. I've seen people say they would welcome a fascist dictatorship if only it meant destroying social media. I've seen people say they want "algorithms" made illegal.

It's obvious from the hyperbole around the discourse alone that this moral panic has reached levels of derangement that far outclass any rational basis for judgement.

Does social media have negative consequences? Sure. Are people assholes on the internet? Always have been. Is social media the greatest and most existentially perilous evil ever conceived by humankind? No.

I think in ten years people will look back at this (on whatever strictly censored and regulated internet replaces this one) with the same bemused confusion as we do the Satanic Panic. And honestly in forty years, if technological civilization still exists, we'll find out how much of that was stoked by the CIA or other interests.

[speak_plainly]

It comes down to the kind of society we want to create, not some existential threat. Social media has an outsized effect on everything from the food people eat to the medical care they receive. The incentives of social media create a great number of distortions within the social media sphere but also in the real world.

Is traveling to Tokyo just to sprint across the Shibuya Scramble for a slightly less-crowded Instagram selfie really a model of the good life? Should someone like Zuckerberg have this level of control over the activities and minds of the human race? Is Mr. Beast a role model for children by industrializing the exploitation of human virtue?

Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

[tolerance]

I couldn't have said any of that better myself...

> Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

To what I think @krapp's point is: these dynamics are not exclusive to social media. At their core they're led by something far more primal than what social media only exacerbates. Governments are not as naive as the general public. Regulations effected in 2026 to "regulate social media" could have consequences on how information is spread among people in 2040.

[seltzerboys]

if you strip social media down to its essential parts it's clear that it can easily cause huge problems for a society. it's basically a never-ending 24/7 stream of information amplified out to anywhere in the world that is:

1. insanely low-effort to post 2. requires NO discernment, proof, credibility, or peer review to post 3. 'viral' in that opinions circulate because other people have interacted with them, not because they are right or meaningful. so bad news, good news, real news and fake news all travel at the same speed, lowering discernment even further 4. echo chambers are baked into the form. people are more likely to interact with content they agree with vs. content that is true or impactful. this creates circles of people agreeing with each other on increasingly niched-down topics.

it is extremely different from newspapers and television.

[krapp]

If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it.

You aren't listing problems intrinsic to social media per se, so much as how people choose to use it and how specific platforms choose to operate. The latter of which is a problem when Twitter, Facebook and the like optimize for engagement through controversy, but I think when we focus on social media as a whole we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater in restricting human rights and the ability of people to network and communicate freely without interference by state interlocutors.

[funimpoded]

> If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it.

“The medium is the message”.

This stuff’s been around long enough we’ve got a pretty good idea of what its “message” is.

[tolerance]

> “The medium is the message”.

What's this mean?

[funimpoded]

It’s a famous phrase coined by McLuhan. He means that the form of a medium determines the kind of overall message it delivers. A case of scrolls carries a different message from a bound codex collecting those same scrolls, and so on. Whatever the hypothetical ability to deliver the same messages over books, TV, silent films, talkies, YouTube shorts, tweets, radio, handwritten letters, emails, et c., in practice the media themselves shape the messages that they deliver, so the broader “message” they effect in the form of shaping society and public life are very different.

[mrmarket]

well yeah. like hacker news is a social platform with checks and balances in place to prevent mass hysteria and ragebaiting. but if we're honest about the biggest social media platforms of the day, each of the things listed are features of them. and because these tools are actually incentivized against fixing each of the problems listed, they will not fix them. so they're functionally essential parts of the social media platforms that are actually shaping public opinion.

[tardedmeme]

Hacker News does not prevent mass hysteria and ragebaiting. It seems like for any social media side, the appearance of preventing negative behaviors is worth far more than actually preventing negative behaviors, which can actually subtract stakeholder value in many cases.

[pibaker]

HN is better than a lot of places such as most of Reddit but saying HN prevents mass hysteria is laughable. When xz was backdoored I saw people were asking open source projects to require government IDs to prevent future attacks. When LK99 came out I was told on HN that it must be real because the prediction markets say it is real. HN also loves to hate certain libraries and softwares the industry has converged into using — which is related to the point in TFA about a minority of peoples speaking over a majority.

[BoredPositron]

You: Other people are unhinged hyperbolists. Here, let me characterize them hyperbolically to prove it, therefore I am the calm rational one and by the way, civilization may collapse and the CIA might be behind this.

I mean wtf. Is this your parody account?

[vintermann]

If thinking CIA manipulates social media and the world is currently in deep trouble is extremism, count me in the 3.1% already, buddy.

[krapp]

You see, you're doing the thing.

Every bit of hyperbole I mentioned is practically quoted verbatim from some thread or another here, it is what people believe, and you can't even bring yourself to approach me in good faith because I've committed wrongthink by defending the existence of social media even implicitly.

The CIA and other governments are running influence campaigns across social media. The links between the major social media platforms and intelligence agencies are well known and well documented. And civilization is threatened by numerous factors, such as our over-investment in AI and the mass deskilling and destabilization that will create, creeping fascism and increasing political violence in a multipolar world, climate change leading to mass famine, pandemics in a post-scientific age, etc.

But people want to destroy social media (and by extension, want to destroy the freedom of communication it allows) rather than bother to consider that the real problem is the same problem we've always had - government and corporate interests trying to control our lives and manufacture consent through fear and panic.

They ran the same playbook prior to social media but the process was so normalized because they controlled so much of the media and culture that no one really even noticed it. Now people notice but they can't distinguish between the symptom and the disease.

[seltzerboys]

i disagree that people would prefer a fascist dictatorship if it meant social media was done away with. i haven't ever seen that opinion anywhere on the entire internet.

however i agree that the CIA and other governments are running influence campaigns on social media. i think that's been proven actually.

the answer, as always, isn't 'destroy decentralized communication' or public discourse online. it's to have tighter regulations on how algorithms are configured. what's pushed vs. what's suppressed because it's obviously intentionally inflammatory/trolling.

this is an issue requiring extreme nuance. but to say that being worried about how social media today affects society is like 'the satanic panic' is kind of absurd.

[BoredPositron]

Case closed.

[krapp]

This is what I get for trying to have a serious conversation here.

Congratulations on the endorphin hit. You really zinged me. I need to find where the grownups hang out.

[BoredPositron]

The thing is you are not you are only pretending to do so. Your predispositions are so ingrained that you even adopted the phrasing and speech pattern of deranged /pol threads. There is nothing to be gained except you reaching for the next talking point on your list.