Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems.
For some reason it seems to bring out the worst in so many people, and people think it's now acceptable to post online the awful thoughts that they would've kept to themselves
For some reason it seems to bring out the worst in so many people, and people think it's now acceptable to post online the awful thoughts that they would've kept to themselves
However, I wonder if the simplest strategy that works when you have to get along with everyone is that you have to become an noisy asshole that overreacts to real "enemies" over imagined slights.
Kind of estranged my family to do it, but as soon as I was in my new city I had a great girlfriend, and my cost of living was much lower, I was much happier.
The old journey kind of took me on a personal discovery. You shouldn't worry about other people criticizing your choices because they aren't going to really affect them, and even if they are they're adults they can sort something else out.
In this new city I would notice even though technically the population was large, the communities were very tight-knit. If you're rude to the local bartender her dad might have a word with you. Contrast it to the internet, I spoke to a girl who had to stop using dating apps because guys would just lead with calling her nasty and fat. In real life if you do that there can be immediate consequences to that behavior.
Imagine if you will you were at a bar, and the Packers are playing the raiders or something, if you start yelling at random people that raiders fans are disgusting and horrible you can expect to be removed, and banned from returning to that bar. ( Or they might agree with you and buy you a beer who knows).
On twitter, Reddit Facebook whatever that doesn't really exist. You can say ridiculously nasty mean things to everyone and nothing's going to happen to you. I had to stop using social media because I would become distraught over some of the stuff I read, almost all the bigotry I experienced was entirely online.
Everyone has a right to spend their time in their energy the way they choose, but since I don't want to be called slurs I don't use social media. I've posted here a ton but back in 2019 I went completely offline and I had amazing partners, made tons of friends, traveled. I even increased my income by no small amount, I used that time I was spending making the Zuckerbergs of the world rich into improving myself.
but if I've learned one thing in my life, it's that self-improvement is very hard, I'm the only person who can put down the second donut. it's a lot easier to go on Reddit and then complain about how societies out to get you, are to go on Twitter and just spread your own, really just self-hatred to other people hoping to dissipate it. Yet you can't, spreading hate doesn't take it out of you, if anything you're just going to get more hate back and then it builds up like a fuel.
Most angry online folks, if you took away their social media and slowly reintroduced them to community, maybe a nice bowling league or something, within a year they'd be so much happier.
Those services match you, with other who share similar views/preferences - putting you inside a bubble.
Before social media radical views\moronic opinions etc. wouldn't spread so far- because others would point out flaws in your reasoning or outright laugh at it.
Now? you have permanent access to enabling group - group who share views, and support each other - entrenching it.
Flatearthers would be ridiculed anywhere - but not they have a group that supports them.
Not to mention that there are literally no consequences of holding an objectively wrong opinion(back to flatearthers) in online discourse.
Don't get me wrong, those people with those view always existed - they just get exposed, via the worst invention of 2000s/2010s, to each other and that let them be more vocal about it.
At that point, they usually mention Galileo and maybe some others, and they ask how do we avoid squashing the next Galileo with our measures to limit the spread of flat Earth theories?
The answer is that if flat Earth or whatever is actually correct it will eventually prevail as did Galileo and all the others they cite (and they faced much more severe measures than merely being denied use of their society's equivalent of mass media). It will just take longer as it will have to use slower more personal communication channels.
That's a good thing. Let's say there are dozens of radical theories circulating, and suppose one of them really is the next Galileo type situation, and the rest really are just utterly insane.
If they all have to spread by the slower more personal channels any given person will likely only be exposed to maybe two or three of them. They aren't overwhelmed by them, and that gives them a better chance of figuring out that the stupid ones are in fact stupid. It is usually much more work to refute a theory, even a stupid one, than to come up with it, and the slow spread gives time for the refutations to be developed and put out there.
If they were all on the fast mass audience channels, people get exposed to so many of them that they don't have time to really figure out if they make sense, and (2) even if a good refutation is out it is easy to miss it in all the noise.
There are many ways to confirm major pieces of evidence for, say, the earth being round. It’s easy enough to do, even without getting into a rocket and seeing the earth’s curvature.
There are many fewer ways to confirm a whole lot of other ideas, though, whether there’s scientific rigor behind the idea’s evidence or not.
For example, I can’t easily confirm the Higgs Boson evidence. But it also doesn’t directly impact my life much, so it’s ok for me to be a little unsure about it and not have first hand evidence.
There are other topics that impact me much more directly than Higgs Boson, and thankfully those things are typically much easier for me to get evidence for. So I think the truth does indeed eventually come to fruition... but when we have vested moneyed interests pushing against the truth? Yikes, that makes things much more difficult.
The Sea of human knowledge is too vast for any single human to traverse it fully.
But here you have people who are anti-experts, who are matched with others with similar sentiment.
And flat-earthers are a very specific example. What about politics, where facts do not matter? Or even objective issues, which got politicized?
The only thing the current social media do, is to entrench beliefs of everyone using them, without regard to what that belief is.
On a side note I would like to remind everyone that Galileo's theories weren't fitting the observations of the world, it was step in right direction but he was also being a dick about it.
It took quite some time for us to develop better lenses, and to use elliptical instead of spherical orbits.
-Uncle Ben
Interestingly enough, HN and reddit have both been really useful for me. Both are much more focused AND the people there don't gain anything by attacking me personally, only by attacking my ideas. This has been really good because it's allowed me to get used to communicating ideas in a way that people will understand them and getting used to people being upset at me.
Social media where people know who I am in real life though, has been terrible. Like, the worst was a few different relatives who were getting "offending" at me because it gave them social capital with other relatives. I had nothing to do with anything, they just wanted to look good in front of someone else by trying to make me look bad. And I suppose that's a good lesson to learn, but it's not something I want to have to deal with from arbitrary many people.
Still can't kick HN ;)
It may seem that way but don't believe it's 100% accurate.
Mental pressure built up within yourself, whatever is their cause, get somewhat released after a good cry. Afterwards you feel a little bit refreshed. You feel a little bit less sad. The anger within you is not as prominent.
Lashing out on people, starting flame wars in your favorite online forum, screaming, yelling and DEMANDING to be heard, shouldn't that also release some of the tensions we all carry around with us from time to time? Wouldn't that leave us a little less motivated to go out IRL and actually hurt someone physically, a little less motivated to sit down and furiously start on the next evil manifesto?
My own brain, though, is not built for social media. I need to see the nervous twitch in your eye, your conniving smile or the loving wink of your eye in order to fully understand you and I think oftentimes when you misunderstand me it's because you didn't see my eye twitching or my mouth smiling. But I've heard other people being absolutely in love with it. It can't be all bad.
So I think you're right that while it is a release, it's an anti-productive one.
One analogy I saw once likened it to having a balloon. You forgot to take out the trash this morning--the balloon got blown up a little. You got stuck in traffic--the balloon got blown up a little more. All those little things happening throughout the day and blowing up that balloon a little bit more each time and pretty soon that balloon is going to violently pop. We can choose things in our life that release that balloon periodically however, and in doing so it never gets so full that it pops.
To me, there is no difference between lashing out online or in person and is more akin to that balloon popping (or, at the very least, adding air to it) than it is releasing air from it.
Not all people have set up a structure in their lives that allow them to slowly release that pressure. We do not all have people in our lives that we can talk to about our feelings. Social media might help these folks.
If I were to lash out at you during lunch or while we're in meeting, people would probably ask me to calm down and say "hey dude, what's going on, you're acting irrational, where is this anger coming from?" and "can we help you in some way, so that you won't feel the need to be so aggressive?"
Social media, however, has not only made flame wars easier to achieve, it has also made it much easier to ignore any concern we might have for the lasher-outers, the people who are clearly in need of some love and affection. In social media, we burn these people by stripping them of their karma.
I find poorly designed karma systems, not social media, to be at fault.
What I suspect would be better would be to pick up the phone and call that person and say those things. The release of venting verbally with a person who is understanding and prepared to accept the venting is likely significantly more productive and healthier than over text.
Then again, 99% of the time, we don't even know that persons name, much less their phone number. Therein lies, I think in part, the crux of the problem: I'm a tribe member who is able to throw stones at a member of a different tribe without immediate or clear consequence.
The algorithms don’t encourage reading of responses like that typically... and, alas, human nature doesn’t really encourage people to “like” or “love” or otherwise strongly react to messages like that.
If the algorithms didn’t exist, the most recent would appear first.
If the algorithms were tuned differently, NLP could be used to pick out the most thoughtful and caring messages to show people, rather than the most liked or most emotionally charged.
I think any social media company using an algorithm should be responsible for what they show, since they have switched from publishing everything to picking winners and losers.
> So I think you're right that while it is a release, it's an anti-productive one.
That ... actually sounds like it had the result of making you not want to do it again in the future, and if that's the case, one could say it was productive. And if lashing out online has less of a bad impact on the person on the other end than lashing out in person, then that seems like an improvement to me.
I don't have to see that online. I get to lob bombs over the wire at someone I've never met and will likely never meet. I can make them feel bad and feel very little consequence for it but easily justify my actions to myself in no small part because I don't have to see how it affected them.
Does it? I've been using social media extensively for almost 30 years now (and now building social platforms for nearly a decade), and a lot of the biggest opportunities I've gotten in my life/career have come from social media. Whatever anxiety it can cause on a day-to-day basis, I feel like you more than make back in various benefits over the long term.