Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.

No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.

Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.

View on HN

I'd put it differently. The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.

Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.

This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.

>The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.

For the Average Joe, absolutely! Completely agreed.

>Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.

This is what it had been like for celebrities, people of fame, of massive wealth, of great success/achievements, and so forth for a very long time. Cultures put those on a pedestal and encouraged people to want to reach for those same things, to want to be more than the Average Joe. We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.

> We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.

Slight modification: We wanted to feel good about things, and Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, took advantage of that to enrich themselves while gaslighting everyone that their manipulation and exploitation was totally ok and normal.

Its easy for people without a conscience like Zuckerberg to do that and laugh about it.

I would even go one step further: Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, ended building an engine that maximizes ad-revenue.

It's really hard to disentangle Meta's actions with the overall push for maximum-profit-at-any-cost mentality of most societies we live in.

I don't think it's the same. People usually don't see their "relationship" with celebrities as peer-to-peer. They either look up or look down on them (i.e., idolize or hate). So the attention you get from fans as a celebrity is actually a lot more meaningful. People go to great lengths to tell you about the impact you had on their life and they don't forget you easily. The scale makes it awkward, but the emotions are real.

On social media, we usually don't care about the other person at all. Likes and comments are 100% transactional. I have thousands of "followers" on X. If I die tomorrow, they won't even notice. The space on their timeline will be filled by other content to retweet or like.

I always thought fandom was '3rd party.' Like, you have an actor in a high-exposure job, but the more the middleware companies boost the allure of any arbitrary celebrity, the more money they'll make. The actor may address 'the people at large' during press events, but by-and-large, don't really interface with fans all that much.

Parasocial

> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. > [...] > Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that *we* were already amplifying, and *perhaps* sped-run that amplification.

No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.

I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.

>I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.

I never said that it wasn't reprehensible.

> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation

> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put

Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.

There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.

This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”. And I personally find it to be a very lame excuse.

Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malicious actions.

>This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”.

This is a disingenuous read of my comment.

>Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.

On this we absolutely agree, especially in regards to Meta. Nothing in life is that black and white, and there's nuance - to ignore our culture's outsized desire for things like that as a part of what pre-disposes us to being addicted to Meta/et al's bullshit is a fallacy.

It is that amplification that is the problem. Everyone has a voice. But if one actor chooses which voices to amplify it is responsible for the results.

This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.

Social media is manipulation. Period.

> No, Meta just amplified

No. "Just" is understating the effect.

Tobacco existed for eons, and then American tobacco companies engineered it to make it a hundred times as addictive with full knowledge of what they were doing. They intentionally created dependencies. I have no sympathy for them. This is too light of a settlement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com