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Comment by Llamamoe | Hacker News Reader

You're basically saying "I believe the problem exists because of the way human nature interacts with social media, not social media themselves".

And sure, maybe it'd work for baboons, crows, or ants, if they ever evolved sufficient intelligence. But it doesn't for human.

Attributing personal blame for systemic issues is just silly. If it happens everywhere, it's not happening as a product of individual, malleable factors but because it's a natural consequence of the factors that add up to it.

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But you're also using "social media" a shorthand for "algorithmic-based attention-maximizing recommendation machine". That's the current implementation of the bigger and most impactful social networks.

Networks that don't work with that model, tend to be much more wholesome. And they work.

Messaging platforms like WhatsApp come to mind

Well these are messengers, not social media. The only social media platforms without algorithms I can think of are decentralized, i.e. what can be described as "fediverse".

Sure, different forms of social media could exist. And then get outcompeted by as you aptly call it "algorithmic-based attention-maximizing recommendation machines".

Even if you introduced regulations against many of these practices, corporations would still strive to optimise this aspect of their platforms in different ways.

Even if we removed capitalistic incentives from the equation, more attention-grabbing platforms would still be selected for.

I'm not saying it's an intractable problem, but rather that this outcome is happening for a very good reason.

Yes, because it's not intractable. It's just a good definition and statement of the problem. Without that, you can even being thinking about solutions or make sensible assessments.

Sharks are not vicious killing machines. Hungry and aggressive instances of sharks are killing machines.

All they did was point out humans have trended towards tribalism since… forever.

Social media has not remade our genome.

On the contrary. Genetic and archeological evidence portrays humans as intermixing since the very beginning.

A survey by an online magazine is far, far from any evidence. Since it did not disclosed the methods, it is probably editorial.

The article is a cloaked ad for social AI that hooks on nostalgia for old internet times. It's useless.

Edit. They actually disclose it is an editorial ad:

> was commissioned by Verge editorial leadership, with surveys from Two Cents Insights. The Vox Media Insights and Research team surveyed over 2,000 US adults representing the US population in December 2024. Two Cents Insights is a boutique research agency that partners with brands and digital platforms to transform research into actionable insights. Its expertise lies at the intersection of consumer needs and business goals, fueling differentiated go-to-market strategies and customer-centric product development.

The algorithm of business development in the web era is A/B testing (and its cousin, multivariate testing). It is a still genetic algorithm, even though the "genome" of a website is not measured by base pairs of nucleic acids. And the algorithm is used to optimise the consumption of our mental resources — our attention is what it "metabolises" into money.

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