7 ms·

Repeat after me, social media is not reality. Social media is the new tabloid salacious media. Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, i

• mountainb 6y ago
  People will look at you funny if you inject fentanyl in public, but we should have the same negative social reaction to social media users and the same negative social reaction to the platform makers as one does to dealers of hard drugs. The immunity from consequences written into the law is creating some toxic effects. Give a corporation a grant of legal immunity and you should not be surprised that they everything that they can to shunt negative externalities onto society to the extent that it improves their metrics (financial and otherwise). If you gave an industrial corporation a grant of immunity for emitting pollutants, would you be surprised if they set every river they could on fire...?
• SkyMarshal 6y ago
  >The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more. I'm afraid it's more like Snowcrash, where the Internet is akin to the "snow", the static pattern that crashes most people's brains, and only a few are naturally immune, naturally critically minded. >Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate. I think this is unfortunately the case, most people are basking in their confirmation bias and social media dopamine hits. Reason is hard, finding reliable trustworthy data is hard, etc. Path of least resistance is to give in.
• intrasight 6y ago
  I have hundreds of Facebook friends. I read their posts or add my own posts perhaps twice a day. 90% are status updates and/or photos of what they are up to. I find it extremely useful. It's a micro-blogging service. When did this moniker "social media" come into being? What does that even mean? I should say that I have everything except direct posts disabled - including all "shares" and all ads - and that's why to me it's just a micro-blogging site.
  • dr-detroit 6y ago
    Thats a hot take. Most blogs are not sex apps turned CIA backed brain experiments and don't read all the text messages on my phone and then distribute them to anyone/everyone in the deep web.
  • bilg21 6y ago
    Would you mind sharing how you've disabled ads and shares? I could not find such options in facebook settings. Only thing I can think of is adblock or writing my own software to pull feeds and filter them.
    • intrasight 6y ago
      I use the F.B. Purity add-on. Can't imagine using Facebook without it.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• phonebucket 6y ago
  > Repeat after me, social media is not reality. > Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate. I find a tinge of irony in this: HN being a form a social media in itself, and this statement also reflecting a general mistrust of social media within HN.
• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Social media is the new tabloid salacious media We’re living through a modern rehash of yellow journalism [1]. Both were spurned by free societies adapting to new communication technologies.
  • thih9 6y ago
    I see a "[1]", but I don't see anything referencing it, did you mean to add a link? If anyone else is unfamiliar with the term, I found a wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
  • olivermarks 6y ago
    I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective. this feeds social network frenzy, a lot of which is people parroting and attempting to amplify ideas from their preferred channels. There's always been a huge corporate yellow journalism problem, now it is possible to instantly orchestrate rage and frenzy repeated across countless personal accounts. Fear and hatred is highly corrosive....
    • ardy42 6y ago
      > I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective. How so, exactly? This is kind of an odd moment, where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out. There are definitely some aspects of the traditional media that fit your description (all cable opinion shows are best avoided by everyone), but that's by no means all of the media.
      • bmarquez 6y ago
        > where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out. Deeply incompetent is an opinion, not a fact. So yes, it is a form of bias. Actual fact-based reporting would be articles like "President did XXXX on YYYY" and leave the opinions and talking heads out. It would also be fairly dry and not generate outrage click traffic which media companies seem to thrive on these days.
• bilbo0s 6y ago
  "Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias" I'm not sanguine. Be honest, which would you bet on happening in the majority of cases? I wonder sometimes if it's almost part of some fundamental psychology?
  • vorpalhex 6y ago
    Do you believe the general public is better at filtering out misinformation than they were 100 years ago? What about 500 years ago? It takes time but people do seem to get better at filtering out mis-information. I believe (and we have some evidence) that we can speed this up by helping teach critical dissection of articles and content and build the skill set to weigh sources. The problem will never go away entirely. It's an arms race between people who want to get closer to understanding reality, and the people selling a story to some end (profit, power, etc). Like all arms races, sometimes one side lags behind but they usually adapt and leap ahead.
    • redisman 6y ago
      We've never had yellow journalism powered by trillion dollar companies that are extremely good at manipulating your average Joe to keep consuming more based on their addiction algorithms.
      • vorpalhex 6y ago
        Those were the conditions of the original yellow journalism, including people who would literally chase you down on the streets shouting headlines at you and trying to get you to buy a paper on your way to and from work. You had people in backrooms analyzing sales based on different newspaper features and writers - and figuring out what headlines would sell the most.
        • redisman 6y ago
          That's still population or city level targeting. Not individual.
• andy_ppp 6y ago
  We need a broadsheet social media that is (relatively) healthy for you.
  • bentcorner 6y ago
    IMO removing clickable links and link previews would go a long way to make social media better.
    • kchr 6y ago
      This! Also remove re-posting functionality.
      • andy_ppp 6y ago
        Maybe posting links could just be paid for?
• meekmind 6y ago
  Yes. This. Thinking is hard and it requires training and conditioning to do. I'm not talking about what to think, but rather how to think. It's an incredible convenience to delegate thinking, like the difference between spending 3 hours debugging some code versus having the answer readily available on StackOverflow. Conversely, that convenience comes with a cost of a stunted intellect, where an individual can become so dependent StackOverflow that they are incapable of doing something new or difficult if it hasn't already been done. Neither is necessarily better or worse, there are good arguments for the "hard way" and the "easy way". The important thing is recognizing the distinction and appreciating the value of both.
  • soindepend 6y ago
    This is a tangent but is the meme about programmers being dependent on Stack Overflow really all that true? It's something I've heard about a lot -- I've been coding for fifteen years, professionally for seven, and certainly I have used Stack Overflow occasionally, but I go to the language documentation a lot more often, and honestly write a lot of code without looking at more than the source of the libraries I'm interacting with -- which are often proprietary so SO wouldn't be any help anyway -- or the standard library. Who's on Stack Overflow all the time? I've never even made an account. I guess I referenced it more often when I was a younger programmer but never all that much..
    • meekmind 6y ago
      That is a good question. I think it really depends on your personality. Engineers tend to be conscientious, orderly, industrious types. Being industrious typically means being a self-starter who takes the initiative and is probably self-taught. That said, intelligence (g factor) isn't simply being conscientious. Being intelligent means that your personality is flexible and you're able to apply different aspects of your personality depending on what the situation calls for. Conversely, less intelligent people are generally stuck with the personality they have and are less able to modulate their behavior depending on the context. Anyway, I used the StackOverflow analogy because it's more likely to resonate with the HN audience. The point was more about knowledge and relying on others as a crutch to avoid having to think for yourself. It's not inherently a bad thing, but doing it too much has consequences that may not be obvious.
• mistermann 6y ago
  You're "not wrong", but my reading of your comments leads me to believe that you're pointing the finger exclusively (or at least, overwhelmingly and possibly disproportionately) at one side of the dispute. > Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure. Social media is an epistemic cesspool, there's no doubt. But do not all of your criticisms also apply (if perhaps to a lesser degree) to all media, and politics, and individual and collective activity, and.....well, everything? > The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more. I feel rather uneasy about whether this is actually as true as it may seem. The thing about "what's true" is, if you've been fooled, you do not realize it. For sure, there are some particularly bad actors online that are often concentrated in certain communities, but how might one know of other bad actors that are not in your mental inventory, or actors who are in your mental inventory labelled as trustworthy, when they are not actually highly trustworthy? The variance in quality of epistemic and logical reasoning that can be observed, in extremely large quantities even here on HN, when comparing discussions of a technical topic compared to a political topic, is vast - and yet....does it seem likely that the people writing these things here are doing it with conscious and deliberate intent? Does it seem likely that HN folks consciously choose to become peddlers of disinformation, or might it be more likely that this is a consequence of the unusual, often counter-intuitive, and not yet understood innate nature of the human species? > Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate. Indeed. Let's hope everyone can truthfully commit to doing this. I wrote a bit more on this general idea (with respect to conspiracy theorists) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24730753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24730753
  • steplock 6y ago
    Qui es veritas?