Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo).
For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.
I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives.
Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree with what the moderators want people to see is an easy way to make it look like everyone is in natural agreement on a topic.
The weirdest part is that most tech people readily admit that Reddit is full of terrible content, even on the front page. The common retort is that it's not so bad if you create an account and manually remove all of those bad subreddits from your list, but by the same argument Facebook isn't a problem because you can simply not subscribe to the bad content.
For example: There is a video of someone blasting music and neighbor clearly being upset. The offender calls the lady Karen. Then, all the comments are bashing so called "Karen". Even though many places in the US have laws in place to prevent people from blasting music all day. Stating this brings many down votes.
I had an awful neighbor in an area where houses are close apart. He would get wasted, cut grass with a lawnmower and blast music out of his car, which he could not hear because of lawn mower. My windows would shake when I was trying to study.
It is fucking terrible for its political news. It's so clearly biased AND it leaks into every default subreddit.
I tried this for a while but the flagrant low-effort karma farming even on those subreddits drove me away. The last subreddit I still read towards the end was r/skookum. It was in interesting community for a while; a lot of neat heavy industry stuff. But I had to quit after seeing about ten thousand "look I found a wrench that says skookum on it, give me uptoots xD" posts.
With that kind of moderation, how is there any other outcome other than a loud, obnoxious hive-mind?
It bothers me because perhaps the younger generation will grow up in Reddit thinking that this hive-mind is normal and healthy.
There are a lot of spaces online, especially on Discord and at one point in Facebook groups where Reddit is regarded as if it were a digital North Korea.
Reddit might do that with their app (I don't use it so I don't know) but with a third party client or the old website I can pretty effectively avoid trolls and nonsense.
It's a controversial topic but I personally think the downvote makes a huge difference in my experience on social media. You see it here on HN as well.
This happens way more than people know, by the way. Some of the moderators on large subreddits are complete dicks to people who go against the grain. Good luck appealing. All you can do is create another account for that subreddit or just never visit it again.
I can't avoid things I don't want to see in facebook unless I have zero friends and only subscribe to community topics (eventually a friend will post a link or opinion on a topic I don't want to see in social media), but if I literally only care about pictures of bees, I can just exclusively follow the pictures of bees subreddit.
Absolutely. Not only are the people on Twitter much more toxic, the trending feed is way more prone to manipulation and influence campaigns. If I don't know someone directly on Facebook, I'm probably never going to see their stupid hot-takes. No such separation on Twitter. Also, whenever I scroll through Facebook, more than half the posts are advertisements anyways. It rarely shows me anything of value from my friends and somehow fixates on the same dozen people. Oddly, I was never even very friendly with those dozen in real life.
People say Facebook is dangerous because people fall into a loop of following content they already like and falling into grouptthink. Firstly, how in the world does not apply more strongly with Twitter? Second, on Twitter it is possible to bombard non-followers with repeated, biased, and motivated messaging. I think this is far more insidious because it creates a false sense of consensus and you can condition people to react a certain way with repeated messaging. And, these users don't even need to actively follow the influencers' accounts.
Edit: I don't even follow people like "Brooklyn Dad, Defiant!", "Duty to Warn", or "Palmer Report", yet I am always seeing content from these paid influencers whenever I click on a trending topic. So imagine if you're not a partisan person and you consistently keep seeing messages from these kinds of accounts. Chances are, eventually, some of their tweets are going to influence how you think and give you a biased view of things.
Being a public social network, Twitter's toxicity and distortions are much more visible than Facebook's, and the user experience is far less varied because of common touchpoints like Trending Topics and celebrity posters.
Facebook is a far more unique experience per user, so personal experience isn't a great way to understand others experience. A lot of Facebook's problems are related to the network you've formed, on Pages you have to follow, or in private Groups. Facebook also serves far more people and is ubiquitous and worldwide in a way that Twitter just is not. That's why you can't really rely on your own judgment of the product and sort of have to fly on instruments (population level data) to understand it. This is also why it's critical to have researchers have access to that data to understand what is going on.
It's way healthier than Facebook, where blocking the crazy friend of your aunt may cause endless real life discussions.
I don't really see how that can be true when only 20% of so of the population actually use Twitter. It's very small beans compared to Facebook, or YouTube for that matter.
Twitter is a fraction of the scale/influence, especially outside of english speaking countries.
WhatsApp is the de facto communication platform in some countries. Facebook is the internet in some parts of Africa. India has nearly as many Facebook users as the US has adults in total.
Even if you don't use Facebook yourself, society around you uses it... a lot... and that impacts you.