The mental drain of the world exerted by social media is completely enormous. It explains so much about the dystopia we find ourselves in.
What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? It seems to have disappeared.
What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? It seems to have disappeared.
goes well beyond breaking up big tech though, needs an entire reversal of culture at this point
Please stop with this appeal to get others to be constantly productive; it is not helpful advice, and being unproductive is crucial to helping the brain relax.
I’m not endorsing toxic social media, but I’m debating your overall gist nonetheless.
Secondly I surely do waste too much time on social media, I don't see how that should stop me from appealing to others as well as myself though, consider me included in the criticism, I'm not a saint. However this holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating it has always been silly.
While you didn’t use the word, the exemplar “social” activities involve more productivity in the general sense of the word, than doom scrolling on social media does. There is space in our lives for both.
> holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating
That is not what I meant. You implied that people should not want a certain aspect of relaxation, while enjoying the same aspect yourself. This is akin to rich people saying “money doesn’t buy you happiness” while enjoying the outcome of having money. There are nuances, but the appeal is flawed nonetheless.
At some point there needs to be personal accountability
Note: Here my de-stress is playing video games. I don't do it much, but a couple hours here and there adds up to thousands eventually.
At first, it was small private chats but now everyone is on 10+ big servers with thousands of members and enough channels to drown in.
Everyone is spending their times on it, staring at the screen waiting for a precious message, scrolling the channel list in the hope that one of them contain a good conversation.
At work, Discord was used so much that the company had to ban it from the computers.
How far do we have to go in order to fulfil the end goal that comes from wanting to delete Facebook?
HN has no marketing, the simplest of design and the most basic of features. Yet, any still refresh it hourly, to the point where the site implemented features to keep you away from it.
Facebook is a problem but it is not the problem.
The reason is as old as time - the administration changed.
Yes what a dystopia we live in
i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it.
ii) said consumerist utopia is neither available to large fractions of humanity, nor is it environmentally sustainable for those who currently enjoy it beyond a few more decades
More fundamentally, if we do not develop "social media" that are trully social: actually promote global mutual understanding, support fact based consensus, promote the genuine empowerment of individuals instead of exploiting and aggravating their ignorance etc. many of the real gains and progress (<ref>Hans Rosling</ref>) achieved in the past century will be squandered, never to return
Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.
As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning.
The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.
Global warning may feel hopeless but compare that to the threat of ozone layer disappearing or acid rain or..
Covid has kill 700+ h1n1 killed 575+. wwi+ii millions
People are so much safer and less likely to die but we have so much more media so we invent things to be scared of because people want you to pay attention to their ads.