5 ms·

s/social media/books/g

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
api 3y ago
Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way. - It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine. There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
- maxwell 3y ago
  Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods. Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.
- jancsika 3y ago
  > - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles. That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to. Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene. On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    Wikipedia doesn't have "infinite scrolling", you have to make a choice to look at associated content. Better still, you get to choose what you look at instead of having an algorithm choose for you. And you could even bookmark what you found and continue exploring at a later date! Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.
- magic_hamster 3y ago
  This is barely scraping the surface. Social media might not be the only thing causing harm to society, but it is still a raging dumpster fire which can be seen from space.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

api 3y ago

Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way. - It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine. There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.

maxwell 3y ago
Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods. Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.
jancsika 3y ago
> - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles. That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to. Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene. On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't have "infinite scrolling", you have to make a choice to look at associated content. Better still, you get to choose what you look at instead of having an algorithm choose for you. And you could even bookmark what you found and continue exploring at a later date! Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.
magic_hamster 3y ago
This is barely scraping the surface. Social media might not be the only thing causing harm to society, but it is still a raging dumpster fire which can be seen from space.