This is touching on something very important but I feel there's a lot more to it. There's a lot of mystery around this for me. Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?
1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead of long conversational openings and explorations of topics. Those require a lot of social trust-building and responding to feedback when you do them IRL, which is difficult on social media because...
2) Other people on social media just feel less real than those you encounter in real life, because you can't feel that bad feeling in your gut as strongly when you upset them, or the good feeling when you make them laugh. That same social distancing means you have a much easier time either idealizing them in that parasocial influencer-guru follower style, or feeling comfortable with being very harsh and combative with them. AKA the toxic gamer lobby phenomena, where people say the most heinous things you've ever heard to eachother, all the while being mostly fairly ordinary kids and adults IRL.
Both of these are kind of inherently tied up in the way we are ordering more and more of our (para)social life, so it seems very difficult to escape.
To paraphrase a point somebody made about content generated by machines purely to tug on your attention - everything feels increasingly meaningless because you have a finite amount of attention, and more and more of the 'social' interactions that your brain deals with in a day ARE meaningless and intended solely to mine your attention and keep you scrolling on ads.
I don't know how to fix that.
One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow such culture around us though.
Now that Discord is apparently opening up to ads, it remains to be seen whether that cultural shift will be able to hold or if people are going to be driven into even deeper hidey holes, like the freed humans in The Matrix who have to hide out deep in the earth from all the robots ;)
We can lay down the foundation for such a culture for the future but it might be too late for most of us to right the ship.
You can't leave everything up to individual decision making or the results are collectively irrational. Notably, dieting and alcoholism are major problems we haven't had much success in addressing on a cultural level. Smoking is probably a better guide given how much rates have dropped in the last century.
What if we removed the profit driven attention seeking behavior by not charging for any digital content, and not consuming profit driven content?
Everything would be free under some kind of UBI scenario, similar to FLOSS but with other things too, like all media.
Take X, for example: its access to capital allows it to eclipse most other social media and build network effects that are difficult for other startups to disrupt; after the Musk acquisition, advertisers began withdrawing from the platform; and as the Twitter files have claimed, its collusion with the U.S. government in the promotion/demotion of certain viewpoints.
If you want to see genuine viewpoints, you'd best seek out media that are largely independent of these three "filters" over what messages are permissible on the medium.
(Sorry)
With that a strongly regulated social media place can be just as hostile as the most vulgar forum you can find. By experience, it can often be even worse.
Nit picking is a form of communication as well, perhaps often chosen because users want to share something difficult to do on the medium. That said, nit picking often doesn't carry hostility. Especially on tech platforms it is just meant as a contribution. Maybe there are carry over effects and miscommunication.
Thanks for asking the question and spawning the conversation threads!
Part of the problem lies here, and I'm doing it right now too.
In online public spaces we never have a conversation with another person, and rarely even then within a small group like enthusiast forums of yesteryear, we comment to the lynch mob. We reply to someone's statement with our own thoughts but it is not judged by the original poster if it was a good or insightful reply to what was originally said, it's judged by the mob with upvotes and downvotes and being flagged, misconstrued and nitpicked in fifty different ways. It happens here, Reddit, Facebook, YT, and any popular venue where comments are allowed. Even Github issues and pull requests.
I think it's why Discord is a popular alternative choice for many people. If you're not actively present, you can't chime in with your two cents and derail the conversation into some energy draining defense against someone's insane straw man attack. Comments needing to be in real time and the conversation being locked away and lost are a virtue for some folks.
So as a matter of caution we tend to impute bad motives to people we can't 'feel' clearly which means any textual claims made are subject to unnaturally high levels of scrutiny and demands for evidence/documentation.
Also the internet is forever whilst IRL conversation is throwaway.
Older folks like myself (GenX) learned the "classic" way...face to face. There were checks and balances. If you said something that skewed hostile you found out it could have immediate direct negative consequences. It could literally leave a mark.
Similarly if you went too far some other way...you found out immediately and directly how that could work out (we were just as cringy...we just didn't have it preserved digitally for prosperity).
Kids today (even writing that makes me wince) have less accountability for what they write than what we had to have for what we said. Also due to scale the effects are amplified. And also you are in a digital bubble that allows you to ignore anything that isn't positive. If you piss someone off by what you said so what? You'll never interact with them directly and there will be 1000s who agree w/ and encourage you.
Also old man shouts at clouds.
I think that's slightly different to what was said in GP:
> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
IOW, `kids these days` are required full corporate PR level accountability whenever and whatever they express, (and zero when cancelling others following social codes). There absolutely won't be thousands at your side unless you're in a straight up proper conspiracy theory circle full of actually schizophrenic people until the entire circle is going to be cancelled dead.
You can't label your opponent as belonging in a category and encourage making harmful gases in a toilet and get 127 upvotes. At least not anymore. Your comment will be deleted, and one below yours that explains why you're automatically doubly stupid will. You can't even say, literally orally voice, the word "die" in some parts of YouTube without algorithmic penalties. Saying "died of injury" can be a soft violation.
That is what GP is explaining by "you have [to] carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say", ironically the phenomenon I'm ending up being a contributing factor by typing this very comment, and part of what's making teens sick. I think it has to do with being correct being a cost and having huge unfortunate abuse potentials.
if there was some way to just start arguments about nothing in real life and then pause them at will to go and cherrypick stuff that supports your argument, then come back and act smug about it (or not come back at all if you don't find anything), people would incessantly do it in person too.
Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints.
The advertising industry is fundamentally about intruding into your lives, and by that measure, the % of attention it can command.
The advertising industry (which is social media is that isn't colossally obvious) has relentlessly pursued increasing this percentage, and the smartphone was the physical means to achieve it, and newfound social addiction feedback loops the nitro turbo boost.
Even modern/new humans can't adapt to this. Older minds are crumbling into echo chambers, or withdrawing entirely. Paranoia takes hold.
Or is it paranoia? Or are your every move, thought, and action collected and categorized into a profile which is currently used simply for "advertising optimization", while in China it produces a worse-than-1984 dystopian system, and likely there are population profiling projects in US three letter agencies?
My internet profile is set in stone from my 20 years. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm purgeworthy whenever the totalitarianism grips the USA. Elections are becoming existential now, and that likely isn't paranoia.
While I've given a rational probability to all this, most people do not, they respond emotionally, especially to relentless stress and burden of processing unending perpetual advertising.
And as we all know, here comes the AI.
So I'd like to point out something I've not seen mentioned yet. That is what I call 'small down behavior', that is nit picking on those that don't fall into some small group that is acceptable.
It seems that social media has not caused any new behaviors, but instead given a new and expansive venue for the behavior to spread.
Just because you don't care about something doesn't mean it doesn't affect you.
For example with many websites, high karma posts/users show up at the top of the feed. This means those addicts messages are the ones you're getting subjected too every day.
Social media is a highlight reel of people’s lives. It’s the best part hand-picked out of our mostly mundane lives.
Until these teenagers understand this, they’ll never feel “good enough” to share their own situation. Instead, they’ll remain on the hamster wheel trying to live up to the ideals peddled by influencers.