4 ms·

I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. We can only blame scale. Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty"

• leokennis 5y ago
  I mean...who else but Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) enabled this scale? I am not advocating for any stance here, but your argument reads a bit like "I don't blame gun manufacturers for gun deaths, I blame sharp solid metal objects travelling through brains at 3000 km/h"
  • helen___keller 5y ago
    I think a more charitable interpretation is that no specific gun company is responsible for gun deaths, as long as it remains legal to manufacture and sell guns, there's going to be somebody out there selling them because the technology/profitability is there.
  • rg111 5y ago
    Scale is a force of nature of human advancement. We can see geography invariance, viz. WeChat, TikTok existing in China where facebook, twitter are not allowed to exist. If these didn't exist, something else would. Scale might have begun with printed books. One author writes something, that is printed as many times as the market demands it. She does not have to lift her pen again. And with her grand success, other authors have to find jobs being private tutors of children of barons and dukes and such or finding adjuct roles in community colleges in modern times. Hell, there is even competition with dead people in this trade. But accountants, devs, barbers don't have to face this. And, I am not supporting this. I know that these girls should not have to face this. But eliminating social media is not the answer, but having better interests is. (This reeks of snobbery and privilege, I know.) Almost all teenager girls I know or knew, did not feel this way for social media. Because they have/had better things to do in life. They were busy with ballet, prep school, volunteering, math clubs, music class, etc. So, there is also a socio-economic aspect to it. As a heterosexual male, I never conformed with the mainstream beauty standards. I, and hence my potential and past partners did not have to face the bad side of scale. I also actively, regularly listen to young pianists on Twitch and donate to them, rather than some decades old recordings (better, too) I could find for free on YouTube or Spotify. I see it this way- scale is inevitable, and even desirable (one girl makes 3000 girls jealous instead of 30; one Physics teacher teaches 300 girls instead of 30- who otherwise would not have access to one- scale is not evil in itself), but you can bypass its effects if you properly want.
    • grapist420 5y ago
      scale began when the first RNA doubled itself, when the first cell doubled, when the first animal doubled, when the first rat learned from another, etc
• helen___keller 5y ago
  Great comment > We can only blame scale. Some things are much more scalable than others, and "beauty" scales. And the "occurrence of beauty" does, too. I think over the next few generations we're going to see humankind adapting to what it means to live with near-infinite scale on all things digital. I don't know what that will look like, but I do hope it works out for the better.
  • arvinsim 5y ago
    From beauty, I think it will shift from conventional beauty to finding something that will set them apart from the rest.
    • rhines 5y ago
      For many people it has - defining yourself by your quirks, or disabilities, or unique sexuality, or whatever else has become celebrated in many circles. Things that at one time might have been considered private or taboo are now used to differentiate yourself from the crowd and gain attention from people who may otherwise have ignored you.
• blodkorv 5y ago
  I fully agree to this. I do also beleive that beauty outside of instagram has become much more common. More people than ever knows about how to work out and eat correct than before. Cosmetic and knowledge about them is also much more widespread.
• nemo44x 5y ago
  Yes, Nassim Taleb comments on those extensively in his books. He calls the world we live in today "Extremistan" and the world from before the age of connectivity "Mediocristan". In essence, things are more and more inclined to be distributed with a power law in today's world as people and things are more and more connected and distributed.
• Clubber 5y ago
  >I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. We can only blame scale. That's very convenient for the execs and shareholders at Facebook and Twitter.
• Factorium 5y ago
  We need Government regulation. Specifically, to not display the # of 'likes', friends, followers and other similar metrics publicly on each page. Remove this metric and you remove the major gamification/psychological element.
  • helen___keller 5y ago
    I think that's an interesting approach although I'm not convinced that's sufficient. Is addictive content less addictive without a visible metric? It removes one potentially harmful aspect but teen girls will still see feeds full of beautiful models living in LA mega mansions.
    • rg111 5y ago
      I don't think that's sufficient at all. Before likes and shares, we had TV, and before TV, we had newspapers and tabloids. The newspapers regularly printed pictures of women considered beautiful according to the beauty standards of that time. That propagated that standard even more widely. And people could easily compare those traits with the traits they saw in the women they knew, and women did feel bad about not looking like the woman in the newspaper. This is old. So, even if we make non-algorithmic, time-based feeds, this problem cannot be fully gotten rid of.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dado3212 5y ago
    This is the Daisy project the article talks about, which appears to have been neutral on this kind of sentiment.
  • grapist420 5y ago
    I agree likes are bad, but 4chan doesn’t have likes. insta girls can still farm attention without it dude
• tickbird 5y ago
  There is standard set of beauty see https://imgur.com/a/j0Llx02 https://imgur.com/a/j0Llx02 I found instagram extremely useful they have great algorithm for finding cute girl which is daily source of masturbation.
• afavour 5y ago
  > I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. Perhaps I would agree with you that I don't blame Facebook for the root problem here. After all, it's been around a lot longer than Facebook. However, Facebook is actively providing the scale you're talking about. They are an accelerant. Not only that, they're making absolutely wild amounts of money while they do so. So, they have an opportunity and the resources to offset the damage done by the scale they profit from. But they have zero interest in doing so. I most definitely blame them for that.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    Who cares? Everyone makes money by pulling a magic lever that hurts other people. Apple pulls their slave labor lever to make a new iPhone, Facebook holds down their 'moderate content' key until their employees start falling apart, and Microsoft occasionally pulls the 'fuck it, ship it' lever to the chagrin of millions of Windows users. There's always a bigger fish, and sometimes that fish is more shareholders, not more consumers. I despise Facebook, and they're almost certainly the most evil FAANG member. But at this point, it's nothing more than par for the course. Facebook is in glib obedience of every 3-letter-agency in every country, everywhere. Blaming Facebook for the behavior that everyone practices in the Fortune 500 is a little misguided.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• mikeyla85 5y ago
  Hard disagree. Facebook does not need to optimize profit and growth in every product decision. They make choices about what to amplify, knowing the consequences of those choices.
  • richwater 5y ago
    > They make choices about what to amplify, knowing the consequences of those choices. You think Facebook specifically crafts algorithms to make teen girls self-conscious...?
    • mandevil 5y ago
      I think that Facebook knows that Instagram is doing exceptional- worse than other social media services popular with teens- damage to teenage girls minds, and doesn't care enough to fix it[1]. Just saying "the algorithm did it," as if humans didn't create that algorithm, constrain it, and are now carefully monitoring its destruction of people's lives, is to absolve the people who work for Facebook of their agency. They built those algorithms and are responsible for their actions. They made a choice to build the algorithm and to give it power. Much like tobacco companies knew that their product was doing exceptional damage to their users lungs, and clearly didn't care either. [1]: They know that because they are quoted in the original article saying that- that Instagram seems to be worse than Snapchat and Tik-Tok for the psyche's of their users. They seem to be taking steps to try and rectify that, but they seem very small, in proportion to the damage that they are inflicting.
• standardUser 5y ago
  I see a much more diverse display of beauty these days than I ever did in the 80's and 90's. There is a conscious effort by a lot of people to broaden beauty standards in recent years, and a larger appetite from people to see different standards in media. I think a lot of this is due to more women in positions of influence and power across fashion and media, including a lot of women who grew up on the hyper-narrow standards of the late 20th century.