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I think there's two major drivers here - scarcity of attention (1) and social distance (2). 1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which mea

I think there's two major drivers here - scarcity of attention (1) and social distance (2). 1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead of long conversational openings and explorations of topics. Those require a lot of social trust-building and responding to feedback when you do them IRL, which is difficult on social media because... 2) Other people on social media just feel less real than those you encounter in real life, because you can't feel that bad feeling in your gut as strongly when you upset them, or the good feeling when you make them laugh. That same social distancing means you have a much easier time either idealizing them in that parasocial influencer-guru follower style, or feeling comfortable with being very harsh and combative with them. AKA the toxic gamer lobby phenomena, where people say the most heinous things you've ever heard to eachother, all the while being mostly fairly ordinary kids and adults IRL. Both of these are kind of inherently tied up in the way we are ordering more and more of our (para)social life, so it seems very difficult to escape. To paraphrase a point somebody made about content generated by machines purely to tug on your attention - everything feels increasingly meaningless because you have a finite amount of attention, and more and more of the 'social' interactions that your brain deals with in a day ARE meaningless and intended solely to mine your attention and keep you scrolling on ads. I don't know how to fix that.

worldsayshi 3y ago
I think you're on to very good points. One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow such culture around us though.
- kombookcha 3y ago
  I do think this is one pathway, and it has kind of been happening - we're seeing people increasingly stop participating 'open' social medias and retreating into more sequestered communities with fewer, but enduring participants that you get to know, and who are united around care for some topic but also talk about other stuff. Discord servers are probably the most prominent of these just now. They have more in common with oldschool forums in the sense that you get to know the regulars, but are notoriously impenetrable if you're new and trying to search for information on some topic that's been covered in the past. But it's a start! Now that Discord is apparently opening up to ads, it remains to be seen whether that cultural shift will be able to hold or if people are going to be driven into even deeper hidey holes, like the freed humans in The Matrix who have to hide out deep in the earth from all the robots ;)
  - worldsayshi 3y ago
    I think another important aspect, another side of the same coin, of this is lack of boredom. If you're not bored you don't take as much initiative towards alternatives. It would be a simple problem if it was just about your own boredom but you have to convince your friends and those that would otherwise start stuff irl to be bored at the same time as well. And you can't coordinate properly because all coordination happens through the attention-stealing-machine.
- throwup238 3y ago
  It’s probably too late for most of us. Kind of like how anti-smoking education has pretty much killed smoking among the younger generations (until vaping came along) but it’s much more prevalent among the older cohort. Only a small fraction conclusively quit for the rest of their life, they mostly just die off. We can lay down the foundation for such a culture for the future but it might be too late for most of us to right the ship.
- darby_eight 3y ago
  > Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. You can't leave everything up to individual decision making or the results are collectively irrational. Notably, dieting and alcoholism are major problems we haven't had much success in addressing on a cultural level. Smoking is probably a better guide given how much rates have dropped in the last century.
- swed420 3y ago
  > One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. What if we removed the profit driven attention seeking behavior by not charging for any digital content, and not consuming profit driven content? Everything would be free under some kind of UBI scenario, similar to FLOSS but with other things too, like all media.

worldsayshi 3y ago

I think you're on to very good points. One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow such culture around us though.

kombookcha 3y ago
I do think this is one pathway, and it has kind of been happening - we're seeing people increasingly stop participating 'open' social medias and retreating into more sequestered communities with fewer, but enduring participants that you get to know, and who are united around care for some topic but also talk about other stuff. Discord servers are probably the most prominent of these just now. They have more in common with oldschool forums in the sense that you get to know the regulars, but are notoriously impenetrable if you're new and trying to search for information on some topic that's been covered in the past. But it's a start! Now that Discord is apparently opening up to ads, it remains to be seen whether that cultural shift will be able to hold or if people are going to be driven into even deeper hidey holes, like the freed humans in The Matrix who have to hide out deep in the earth from all the robots ;)
- worldsayshi 3y ago
  I think another important aspect, another side of the same coin, of this is lack of boredom. If you're not bored you don't take as much initiative towards alternatives. It would be a simple problem if it was just about your own boredom but you have to convince your friends and those that would otherwise start stuff irl to be bored at the same time as well. And you can't coordinate properly because all coordination happens through the attention-stealing-machine.
throwup238 3y ago
It’s probably too late for most of us. Kind of like how anti-smoking education has pretty much killed smoking among the younger generations (until vaping came along) but it’s much more prevalent among the older cohort. Only a small fraction conclusively quit for the rest of their life, they mostly just die off. We can lay down the foundation for such a culture for the future but it might be too late for most of us to right the ship.
darby_eight 3y ago
> Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. You can't leave everything up to individual decision making or the results are collectively irrational. Notably, dieting and alcoholism are major problems we haven't had much success in addressing on a cultural level. Smoking is probably a better guide given how much rates have dropped in the last century.
swed420 3y ago
> One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. What if we removed the profit driven attention seeking behavior by not charging for any digital content, and not consuming profit driven content? Everything would be free under some kind of UBI scenario, similar to FLOSS but with other things too, like all media.