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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

> We aren’t using social media to drive action. We are using it to farm a false sense of worth. To cast stones at anyone who foolishly stumbles into the latest virtue-trap.

Yeah, it feels like most of social media is now shit-flinging and calling the "outside group" stupid so one can feel "At least I'm not a stupid horrible person like that idiot!".

I notice on Instagram you can "like" comments but not dislike them, to disagree with someone you have to put in more effort and type a rebuttal. This "oh we prefer positivity" behavior also means reinforcement of ignorant behavior, by the many likes people see that they get for their hateful comments.

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Social media simply amplifies what is already common among human beings. One way it seems to do this is by flattening and legitimizing impropriety. Normal societies are "chunky", that is, you have niches and enclaves and varying distance unified in some increasingly "thin" manner. This enables various kinds of relationships to flourish (think of how marriage creates a special space for the couple, and then another space for the family that results from it, then consider the different space that the extended family creates, or coworkers create). But in social media, this structure evaporates. Everyone is shoved into the same space. People you barely know or don't know are on par with your closest family and friends. This is bound to cause aggression and nosiness and impropriety. To put it hyperbolically, it's like having your coworkers in bed with you making lewd comments as you have sex with your spouse. Social media encourages and defaults to this kind of boundary violation so that you are effectively consenting to it by using it because otherwise, it makes little sense to use. So telling someone to mind their own business becomes more difficult _because you're the one who volunteered the information in the first place_, whereas you can still tell an intrusive stranger to piss off with the confidence of moral justification.

This is very astute. It's as if all social institutions were dissolved, then reconstituted into a single structure that is bad at just about every interaction it destroyed.

Google solved this with circles. Too bad that thing didn't catch on.

With Facebook and Twitter you can make lists. This feature is fairly recent, I think they are the same as the late Google Plus circles.

>Social media simply amplifies what is already common among human beings

We all have some anger in us too. But we're not all frequently beating up or even killing people in powerful fits of anger. Something that "simply amplifies" pre-existing violent tendencies can have a dramatic detrimental effect on society.

Human beings have many potentialities. Amplifying some of them as opposed to others, is enough to change major parts of our behavior, personality, and even society.

Well said.

Doesn't it flatten all behavior and not just impropriety?

I really do miss the days where candor was seen as a sign of respect. Now it's just seen as being contrarian or even insulting. All because you "ruined" their virtue-fueled dopamine drip.

It's not a genuine interaction, at all. It's a town hall full of shit posters, some of which you went to school with or just happen to be related to. There are literal families divided right now because Becky went full "nobody asked, stay off my profile" mode on her Uncle Steve. Which is just nuts.

Really makes me worry about where we'll be in 20-30 years, socially speaking.

> All because you "ruined" their virtue-fueled dopamine drip.

You are ignoring how peoples diet have changed over the decades. Life activities were more directed towards survival, even things like growing vegetables in the back garden or allotment were hobbies to help put the icing on the cake for an otherwise functional world.

Today, with food aplenty and technological gains like mobile phones, the internet, not just social media, is perhaps best seen as a mirror of the human psyche, a mirror of the regional, national and global collective ego's.

This may well be a golden age for the advancement of psychology.

> most of social media is now shit-flinging and calling the "outside group" stupid

I saw myself in both your quote and the one you responded to.

For the past year, I've participated in calling out Unstoppable Domains for their bullying tactics[1], shady behavior[2], &c. I've delighted in catching their employees off-guard in obvious lies. I've made ample use of the #StoppableDomains hashtag to further expose how they're a Web2 company masquerading as Web3. All this for Twitter to indefinitely ban my account for "platform misuse."

Was it worth it? My previous data export was almost a year ago so, unfortunately not. Losing a decade plus of memories hurts but it further illuminates the need to own your content (and that's a rant for another day).

I do think that holding people and corporations accountable is important. At this point though, I don't care to continue putting energy into platforms and not really getting much back from them (if anything).

[1]: https://domainnamewire.com/2023/06/26/court-handshake-wallet...

[2]: https://twitter.com/_chjj/status/1565158353055145985

It’s such a mess, getting worse and worse. I have a solution though:

> select * from posts where author_id in $following order by posted_date desc

No more gaming engagement or viral rage.

That will only incentivize posting low quality worthless things in order to improve position and reach in comments. Might as well just charge them $8/mo for the privilege of making other people see their comments.

Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were suggesting (just a chronological timeline?).

The people I follow, bless their hearts, are more than capable coming up with viral range and engagement bait even given this scheme.

We literally had exactly this model on all social media platforms for years and while I certainly remember everyone had that uncle who posted everything he saw on Fox News and exchanges that made for awkward Thanksgiving dinners it wasn’t nearly as toxic as it’s gotten now, especially wrt strangers and bots.

This is how Mastodon works right now. I assure you, there’s plenty of this kind of content there.

Well I certainly don’t have empirical data or anything other than my own experience of close to 20 years interacting with people online prior, the biggest thing that has changed as far as I can tell is the drive to engagement and introduction of algorithms to further that goal.

Of course there’s always has been and always will be toxic content but to me it feels like society is breaking down in a way that is unlike what was happening before and it seems largely driven by social media interactions.

This. People keep saying how the Fediverse is awesome and different. But everytime I go to sign up for Mastodon, I'm greeted with culture war rage bait and I decide against joining.

But it's not the case for me, how comes?

Surely you must willingly follow people who post this kind of content, or inflammatory tags? Because I think it's the only way this content can reach you.

> Surely you must willingly follow people who post this kind of content, or inflammatory tags? Because I think it's the only way this content can reach you.

Really? Right now, if I go to mastodon.social, I'm redirected to https://mastodon.social/explore and 3 out of the first 4 posts are people fulminating about "red states", "anti-racism" and "Twitter" respectively.

Similarly, if you visit certain instances you will be greeted with the polar opposite of that. The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others. If you actually create an account you will be able to pick and choose whose posts you want to see.

The strictly chronological approach seems to work fairly well as long as you only follow a few people but it doesn't scale very well.

> The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others.

Which ones are less political? I went to a supposedly global and tech focused instance only to find US political slogans in the "About" page itself.

> If you actually create an account you will be able to pick and choose whose posts you want to see.

That didn't work on Twitter and I doubt it'll work on Mastodon. Neither of them have a way of categorising posts into topics. There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.

> There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.

Well that's a weakness inherent to microblogging, some people like it evidently (as seen by the success of Twitter). I don't and only got a Mastodon account because I need it to follow some work I'm interested in, and indeed I need to ignore posts I don't care about.

Following and ignoring tags helps, but it's not perfect. But it works better than on Twitter.

> The inhabitants of some instances are more political than others.

The founding generation of Mastodon roughly overlaps with people who believe that everything in life is political. Moreover, that group roughly overlaps with people who believe that attempting to escape strident political rhetoric is itself a political action directed against whatever groups they are passionate about. Founding-generation Mastodon users have expressed concern about the Mastodon ecosystem eventually evolving out of the kind of concerns and way of writing that they have, to something more representative of the broader public.

Well I have to say I never really visited this instance directly, I just visited the main French one (piaille.fr) initially, and eventually signed up on the SDF instance but I just don't visit the "local posts feed", I only read what I'm following.

As far as I know my experience would be the same with any other instance, nobody has to read random posts by people who just happen to be on the same instance.

> Yeah, it feels like most of social media is now shit-flinging and calling the "outside group" stupid so one can feel "At least I'm not a stupid horrible person like that idiot!".

Like the folks here on HN in this very thread flinging shit and calling those horrible social media users idiots, you mean? The irony in your comment is just too much. Yikes.

Just stop. People are people. In-group/out-group abuse and hate has been a fact of life for as long as we've been a species. You treat that, as Nova did, with understanding and empathy, not with more hate.

As long as you (and you're hardly alone in this topic!) walk around with that chip on your shoulder you are guaranteeing never to escape your personal in-group prison, nor to ever make peace with the out-groups you're yelling about.

Are you sure that the disagree button is because they prefer positivity? I am not a social media user, I have none of them, but I've always read that social media eat their lunches thanks to flame wars, would it be possible that the non-existent disagree button is because a disagree button would be a passive way to show disagreement, while a message is more likely to generate engagement?

I support the post author's position completely. It's incredibly clear to me now after using social media for about a decade that it's not something healthy to participate in, and I shouldn't use it beyond a few really specific scenarios, like communicating with a business.

I've watched it destroy relationships, including some of mine, and turn people into psychopaths. When I meet someone new I can observe a pretty consistent correlation between how heavily they use the major social media platforms and how awful of a human being they are.

It is not a thing you want in your life, full stop.

The HN comments section is an instance of social media.

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