[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.

[tolerance]

I'm not sure how that affects the arguments at play here. Social media is not a single thing. It has various forms each bearing its own kind of "message" revealing and influencing parts of society in a variety of ways depending on the platform.

It's a lot easier to not have to delineate the myriad of effects that each platform has on its users and issue broad-sweeping legislation that will have consequences on how information is distributed and how people can interact with each other according to how information is spread.

We're dealing with technology capable of containing various kinds of media at a scale far unlike what McLuhan observed 60 years ago. That's not so say that he's become obsolete.

Read this and let me know if I'm getting it wrong...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060605204535/http://individual...

[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.