“Hard left” - > Thinks human rights are a thing and wishes for universal healthcare…
There’s more “hard left” (not sure of that’s a porn category or a music genre) than fasch stuff on “social” media? Doubt.
You won’t find any questions on the CES about, say, whether the respondent approves of capitalism. So yes, this analysis was likely done with the American Overton window in mind.
Well if you categorize everything that isn’t alt-right as hard left, it’s pretty believable. I mean hell, have you seen Wikipedia? Clearly hard left.
Considering the OP says the best social media places are the Nazi supporting ones…
Left extremism is good, actually
When people say “left wing extremism” they mean calls to end hunger by taxing billionaire out of existence. When they talk about “right wing extremism” it’s people literally advocating for genocide.
Eh the “radical left” is literally anyone opposed to fascism these days. “Left wing extremism” can’t be too far from that.
No, its not because in the end even the most noble goals will lead to tyranny and suffering when carried out by fanatics.
Do you think the biggest monsters in history started their day by thinking “Well, today I will make the world a little bit worse… hehehe”?
A bit strongly negative on phone use in general, but I’d say it’s a good overview of why most major social media websites (with algorithmic recommendations being a heavy handed component of one’s feed) are bad and why the traditional method (time-based sorting with subscriptions or feed curation) are better although not perfect.
Yeah, my phone has productivity timers, my note taking app, temperature controls for my home office, not to mention 2FA and other tools I need. I don’t see myself leaving it in the kitchen.
That said, reading this did made me think to turn off email push notifications. Fortunately I’m not in a position where I have to reply to emails immediately, so I like the idea of scheduled email time. Honestly don’t know why I didn’t think of that.
The only social media I consume is lemmy, and that’s only about 3 hours per day at most. I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time. It was easy as soon as I started going for regular walks
About the same here, though I have to say… Reading the “3 hours per day” part out loud still seems… Insane somehow.
In a similar vein, I’m currently staying at my mom’s house, and the internet is too shit to use my Jellyfin. As a result, I haven’t been watching any shows, and my day seems to be infinitely longer, like a million more activities fit in the sake 24 hours.
It’s a bit of a self-sustaining cycle. Media depends on engagement, social media even more so. Hate engagement is capable of increasing engagement, and it’s easier to create content that elicits hate engagement. Throw Internet Rando participation on top of that.
No, you should not quit social media. The beauty of it is that content that traditional media would never take a chance on which you would like to consume actually exists. What you should do is be mindful of what kind of content you choose to consume, and recognizing when content has an undesirable agenda beneath its surface. Content is not normally created for no purpose. Always ask “Why was this created? How does the creator intend for me to react to this? Is that an appropriate reaction?”
Just letting the content pour into your brain without consciously filtering it is a bad idea, and that’s got nothing to do with social vs traditional media at all.
Then again, it might be easier to make people stop doing something than it is to make them do something mindfully. Doing anything with intent is difficult.
Not that I disagree with you, I’m just afraid it’s a lot to ask. I guess that goes for asking people to stop using social media as well though.
I’m sure you’re right for a lot of people. Considering the audience here, who I expect to be more capable of doing more complex things on the basis of “they’re here”, I hope my advice is more productive than it would be to, say, the local rural Facebook moms group.
Additionally, Reddit and Substack are also good “social media” platforms, if what you care about is reading posts from people in the same community as you or people you have opted into receiving newsletters from.
Isn’t it only true for algorithmic feed social media? Is lemmy safe from that over-representation?
Yeah, most of what the article complains about is algorithmic social media and how it boosts engagement of any kind, whether positive or negative. This leads to “extremist” takes gaining ground easier then moderate takes. Combined with algorithmic siloing, echo chambers etc. That we’ve heard a million times, make people more radical and disconnected from reality.
The “algorithm” most people use on lemmy is just most up voted, so controversial takes rarely rise to the top. A lot of the stuff would be considered controversial outside of here, but within lemmy there’s a “hard left” consensus where the moderates are probably democratic socialists.
The “algorithm” most people use on lemmy is just most up voted, so controversial takes rarely rise to the top. A lot of the stuff would be considered controversial outside of here, but within lemmy there’s a “hard left” consensus where the moderates are probably democratic socialists.
Right. And that is the radicalizing echo chamber effect - affective polarization - the article talks about.
That is to say, if I go to all, probably half of the top 10 or 20 posts will be low context memes or screenshots of Twitter talking about Republicans doing horrible things - because those are what’s most upvoted. And if I go into comments I’m going to see calls for violence and censorship and rejections of compromise and common ground. And if I got my news and my understanding of the world from Lemmy, it would be easy to believe a whole bunch of people in the United States have given up on civil society and committed themselvesto political violence.
(Edit: I just checked the top ten posts on all, sorted by active. Three articles about tech (two about the new Steam hardware and one about Google’s new side loading policy), two articles on the shutdown, four leftist memes and one anti-AI Twitter screenshot. I wasn’t too far off.)
Sorting posts by most upvoted and most active is a simple algorithm, but it is an algorithm, and it does leads to the same harms the article discusses - because low effort content can be read and upvoted quickly while scrolling through Lemmy, so an unsourced meme or one paragraph Twitter post gets hundreds of upvotes, while longform articles only get a handful of upvotes because people don’t want to take the time to read them while scrolling.
Of course, the most passionate, angry, dramatic, and emotion-provoking memes get the most upvotes and go to the top of the algorithm. And because Lemmy is full of leftists, the memes that make them passionate and angry are mostly about right wing people doing bad stuff.
There’s a common saying on the left, “you are not immune to propaganda”. Similarly, you are not immune to the harms of algorithmic social media, whether you use Lemmy or Reddit.
(And that’s not even going into how certain instances post actual, literal, propaganda, which is a whole other story.)
It seems a lot of your critiques are more of the media in general and not social media.
if I got my news and my understanding of the world from Lemmy, it would be easy to believe a whole bunch of people in the United States have given up on civil society and committed themselvesto political violence.
Yeah and if I got my news from Fox News or the New York post it would be easy to believe the cities are full of gangs of maurading immigrants. At least lemmy doesn’t pretend to be a “fair and balanced” representative of the US. Everyone here knows lemmy is far left relative to the US just like they know everyone’s not using or interested in Linux .
As for the favoring of longer form more in depth content vs short form out of context content, that’s just what people like and are drawn to regardless of the media type. More people will watch TV news with shorter segments and less content then a newspaper, and more people will watch late night with even shorter form and less context then TV news. And then there are people who don’t watch or engage with the news at all because they have other things to do.
If anything lemmy is better then a lot of the other social media because it doesn’t disincentivize links. Most other platforms the algorithm is optimizing for watch time / keeping you on the platform, so links to long form news articles get down rated because if you click on that link and go to that site for 5 mins, that’s 5 mins your not spending on the platform. For that sample you took half of the top posts were links to articles, see how long it would take you to find one article link scrolling through tik tok.
Of course, the most passionate, angry, dramatic, and emotion-provoking memes get the most upvotes and go to the top of the algorithm.
Again this is a problem with all media, if it bleeds it leads has been an adage for centuries.
In general lemmy is showing people what they want to see, which media in general has always tried to do. Yes there are a lot of valid critiques of the behavior that this prerogative incentivizes, but that’s different than the critiques of algorithmic social media that prioritizes engagement and staying on the platform, which brings in a whole new set of problematic incentives in addition to the standard problems of media.
Lemmy also benefits from not tracking total karma or whatever. Per-post or per-comment scores at most.
From my experience, Beehaw disabling downvotes furthers this even more. This means that people can either voice their disagreement, report the post/comment for violating the rules, or ignore it and move on. There’s no way to anonymously “punish” a post you disagree with (unless it violates the rules), and not as much incentive to stick to the echo chamber either.
I’ve never gotten the point of upvoting or downvoting as the main for of engagement with “social” media. I may do one or the other once a week when I get a chuckle or see an absurd take on journalism that isn’t worth engaging with, but simply clicking an icon is scarcely participation.
People with actual things to say is far more satisfying than facing a Hatfield-McCoy standoff.
That is pretty obvious, what’s really wild about this blog post and proof that we need off social media was that AI generated Gavin Newsom post with Ted Cruz and Hulk Hogan.
Posts article on social media. How ironic!
Where else would you put it? Social media users are the target audience. People who don’t use social media don’t need to read an article about why they should quit social media 😆
