Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

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Social media's aims are unlike any other social space to come before.

Restaurants gather people together around delicious food and everyone is able to enjoy themselves at the table with a meal and friends. Friendly engagement.

Parks invite people to have recreation at various stages in life, whether with team sports, a playground, just running around the grass, or a picnic. Friendly engagement.

Public transit helps people congregate on vehicles for the sake of traveling to a common destination, and therefore disparate people are united by this common goal of arriving safe and sound.

I could go on about all the public spaces that promote some kind of friendly engagement and socializing, but social media such as Facebook is calibrated and designed to put us at one another's throats. It's not good if we see a post and let it go by, we must lash out and correct or attack. Dislikes are as valuable as Likes in the Facebook economy. Hordes of censors are required to tamp down the inevitable violations that occur when people go out of bounds. Social media thrives and grows from attacks, libel, gossip, and falsehoods.

Of course this is all only an extrapolation of print and broadcast media as it came before. Nothing has changed since Moses broke the tablets and Luther nailed up his theses. But social media is concentrated and unadulterated poison.

I have not experienced the toxic negativity you have associated with only modern social media. I am in a couple of online groups of the things you are describing as social spaces of before, there's a local hiking group, an unofficial puzzled pints group, multiple AI and Defcon related groups, TV show discussion groups, and occasionally concert groups for when an artist I enjoy is playing near me. If you're not using Facebook or Discord or some other social media for this, I would suggest you look into it. Social media is focused on self curation as much as algorithmic curation. If you have to approach your social media feed like a warzone, I would start by muting or unfollowing as many problematic people as possible. It'll be up to you to make sure your feed doesn't become an echo chamber, but at a minimum you won't feel such negative anger towards a literal piece of code.

Like and Dislikes are only as valuable as users allow them to be. A great counterexample to many of your arguments is the social media site we are discussing this topic on. The culture on Hacker News de-emphasizes Likes and Dislike. Comment karma is visible to the poster, but to a reader, a +100 karma comment is equal to a +4 karma comment with the only difference being what is seen first. I personally forget about that and end up reading comments to the end of threads I enjoy anyway.

I think letting such hostility build for the concept of social media is as damaging as any political extremism the censorship is supposed to combat. It feels like the extremism isn't gone, just redirected. Social media and the internet has changed who people interact with, not just how. In the past extreme ideas existed, but were tempered because of others around them. Social media has allowed people to choose to only listen to people with the same perspective, letting extreme ideas go uncontrolled. You can argue that it's the fault of the technology, but the main responsibility falls on the individuals.

Social media doesn't make people hateful, it makes it easier for hateful people to convince other to think like them. Bullies have existed long before social media and continue to exist in every context.

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