I also noticed something in my friend group. No one makes anything. Its all share share share. Im the only one taking original photos or videos or making jokes. Its kind of sad. And is not like their lives are boring either. They’d just rather consume others stuff.
Are most people like that?
Yes.
Whatchu gonna do about it?
~(not asking specifically you, bridge, just didn’t want to leave the thread at a circle jerk)~I’ve started asking people what they have created lately… They seem to take it as an insult when it isn’t meant to be.
The reality is consuming is easier than producing. You can see it with the usage of phones and tablets vs laptops. It’s hard to create on a touch screen but it’s easy to consume.
I mean lemmy is pretty fucking neat, i love it here, no need to fix anything.
BULLSHIT
It’s got its issues (for me the main one are the tankie scum devs), but it seems to be the best platform there is.
The good thing about it is you can move to clients like Piefed and still access all the content / communities.
As long as the devs have an instance-agnostic ‘live and let live’ attitude and just ignore any instances they don’t politically like and advise others to do the same, it’s not really a problem.
If they ever try to enforce their ideology via their code: actual issue.
(for me the main one are the tankie scum devs)
This right here is the crux of the problem and why the problem goes back so much further than the design and algorithms of platforms. We teach kids to focus on individual achievement, to celebrate the self, and we don’t teach empathy, something that needs to be taught young and can easily be taught but the west increasingly considers weakness and a dirty word.
When we fail to teach citizens of a society collectivism, because being a member of a society means you are part of a collective whether you decide to be a good collective that functions or one that operates against itself (herp derp competition!) that does not, you get communication between members like this.
“I hate these people fuck them they should me more like MEEEE” “their opinions suck because they aren’t more like MIIIINE” and we act as a bunch of petulant infants that resent each other’s very existence in OUR world.
If we were taught that it is our responsibility to lift one another up, if we rewarded people in society on the basis of who and how many others they’ve helped and not how much they hoarded for THEMSELVES, this wouldnt be as much of a problem. We could, now that we don’t have to survive in nature, orient our mindsets to the positive, which would have to be encouraged young. Instead we’re made to be like… This. A useful state for killing a rival in YOUR hunting area when there’s only enough game in the region for one tribe to survive the winter, not so much when trying to build a civilization up. And don’t get me started on the counterproductive mindfuck that is nation states and super serious imaginary lines between them, meant to protect hoards of INDIVIDUAL wealth of respective elites.
The problem is, how do you start such a virtuous cycle when everyone from the owners down are only concerned with “ME ME ME MINE MINE MINE?”
Then again you hate tankies, so go ahead and cuss me out for calling out the reality that capitalism, especially when it has effectively conquered the culture, turns people into selfish little gremlins more likely to shoot a stranger than help them.
Childish take. Perfect example of why western online leftism will always be a failure.
You wouldn’t be writing this shit if your family had to leave their due to a russian invasion and then eight years later having to deal with another full scale invasion (with a shad part landing in the house next to yours).
Grow up!
Oh I think the capitalist “grown ups” as you say only concerned with quarterly GDP and their own individual hoards in charge are doing fine on their own. Don’t you?
They don’t need some idiot commie child as you say like me getting in the way of this great society’s trajectory. This bull is loose!
I lost, we leftists lost, and since the capitalists are destroying the very COMMUNal climate we rely on from one breath to the next, it’s too late for us to ever turn it around, as civilization hangs by a thread on the easy baby “just don’t shit where you sleep” climate mode we enjoyed and are eviscerating as we speak in the name of year over year metastasis.
What does winning feel like? Is it awesome? Do you feel victorious in your capitalist society?
What are you on about?
I never mentioned anything about capitalism and communism.
At any rate, tankies are supporters of genocidal, authoritarian state-capitalism, so whatever you’re trying to imply is moot.
The study is based on having LLMs decide to amplify one of the top ten posts on their timeline or share a news headline. LLMs aren’t people, and the authors have not convinced me that they will behave like people in this context.
The behavioral options are restricted to posting news headlines, reposting news headlines, or being passive. There’s no option to create original content, and no interventions centered on discouraging reposting. Facebook has experimented with limits to reposting and found such limits discouraged the spread of divisive content and misinformation.
I mostly use social media to share pictures of birds. This contributes to some of the problems the source article discusses. It causes fragmentation; people who don’t like bird photos won’t follow me. It leads to disparity of influence; I think I have more followers than the average Mastodon account. I sometimes even amplify conflict.
Pre print journalism fucking bugs me because the journalists themselves can’t actually judge if anything is worth discussing so they just look for click bait shit.
This methodology to discover what interventions do in human environments seems particularly deranged to me though:
We address this question using a novel method – generative social simulation – that embeds Large Language Models within Agent-Based Models to create socially rich synthetic platforms.
LLM agents trained on social media dysfunction recreate it unfailingly. No shit. I understand they gave them personas to adopt as prompts, but prompts cannot and do not override training data. As we’ve seen multiple times over and over. LLMs fundamentally cannot maintain an identity from a prompt. They are context engines.
Particularly concerning sf the silo claims. LLMs riffing on a theme over extended interactions because the tokens keep coming up that way is expected behavior. LLMs are fundamentally incurious and even more prone to locking into one line of text than humans as the longer conversation reinforces it.
Determining the functionality of what the authors describe as a novel approach might be more warranted than making conclusions on it.
“Fixing” social media is like “fixing” capitalism. Any manmade system can be changed, destroyed, or rebuilt. It’s not an impossible task but will require a fundamental shift in the way we see/talk to/value each other as people.
The one thing I know for sure is that social media won’t ever improve if we all accept the narrative that it can’t be improved.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
-Ursula K Le Guin
Yeah, this author is the pop-sci / sci-fi media writer on Ars Technica, not one of the actual science coverage ones that stick to their area of expertise, and you can tell by the overly broad, click bait, headline, that is not actually supported by the research at hand.
The actual research is using limited LLM agents and only explores an incredibly limited number of interventions. This research does not remotely come close to supporting the question of whether or not social media can be fixed, which in itself is a different question from harm reduction.
Particularly apt given that many of the biggest problems with social media are problems of capitalism. Social media platforms have found it most profitable to monetize conflict and division, the low self-esteem of teenagers, lies and misinformation, envy over the curated simulacrum of a life presented by a parasocial figure.
These things drive engagement. Engagement drives clicks. Clicks drive ad revenue. Revenue pleases shareholders. And all that feeds back into a system that trades negativity in the real world for positivity on a balance sheet.
Social media isn’t broken. It’s working exactly how it was meant to. We just need to break free of it.
I think just going back to internet forums circa early 2000s is probably a better way to engage honestly. They’re still around, just not as “smartphone friendly” and doomscroll-enabled, due to the format.
I’m talking stuff like SomethingAwful, GaiaOnline, Fark, Newgrounds forum, GlockTalk, Slashdot, vBulletin etc.
These types of forums allowed you to discuss timely issues and news if you wanted. You could go a thousand miles deep on some bizarre subculture or stick to general discussion. They also had protomeme culture before that was a thing - aka “embedded image macros”.
No shit. Unless the Internet becomes democratised and publicly funded like other media in other countries like the BBC or France24, social media will always be toxic. They thrive in provocations and there are studies to prove it, and social media moguls know this. Hell, there are people who make a living triggering people to gain attention and maintain engagement, which leads to advertising revenue and promotions.
As long as profit motive exists, the social media as we know it can never truly be fixed.
We’re on the solution right now, lmao
Uhm, I seem to recall that social media was actually pretty good in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The authors used AI models as the users. Could it be that their models have internalized the effects of the algorithms that fundamentally changed social media from what it used to be over a decade ago, and then be reproducing those effects in their experiments? Sounds like they’re treating models as if they’re humans, and they are not. Especially when it comes to changing behaviour based on changes in the environment, which is what they were testing by trying different algorithms and mitigation strategies.
Social spaces aren’t something that needs fixing.
We blame the problems caused by wealth inequality on technology as a way to not even discuss making the rich contribute to society
The amount of comments thinking that Lemmy is totally not like a typical social media is absurd.
Guys, we only don’t have major tracking of users here.That’s it! Everything else is the fucking same shit you’d see on facebook. The moment Lemmy gets couple tens of millions of users, we gonna become 2nd facebook.
It’s that there’s no incentive to have 80 million bots manipulate everything. Our user base is too small, and likely too jaded about fake internet points to be a target for scammers, ai slop bots, or advertisers.
Or at least that’s what I thought when I drink a refreshing Pepsi! hiss-crack! glugg glugg Aaaah!! PEPSI! The brown fizz that satisfies! Pepsi!
Lemmy doesn’t have a neural net prediction/recommendation engine. This is a HUGE difference.
I’m not surprised. I am surprised that the researchers were surprised, though.
Bridging algorithms seem promising.
The results were far from encouraging. Only some interventions showed modest improvements. None were able to fully disrupt the fundamental mechanisms producing the dysfunctional effects. In fact, some interventions actually made the problems worse. For example, chronological ordering had the strongest effect on reducing attention inequality, but there was a tradeoff: It also intensified the amplification of extreme content. Bridging algorithms significantly weakened the link between partisanship and engagement and modestly improved viewpoint diversity, but it also increased attention inequality. Boosting viewpoint diversity had no significant impact at all.
Meta and twitter cease to exist tomorrow and 99% of the issues are solved IMO
The fediverse is social media and it doesn’t have anything close to the same kinds of harmful patterns
It’s almost like the problem isn’t social media, but the algorithms that put content in front of your eyeballs to keep your engagement in order to monetize you. Like a casino.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft would still be there, so the Internet seems to be suffering from a metastatic cancer at this point. Cutting off two revolting lumps helps, but the prognosis doesn’t look that great.
The article argues that extremist views and echo chambers are inherent in public social networks where everyone is trying to talk to everyone else. That includes Fediverse networks like Lemmy and Mastodon.
They argue for smaller, more intimate networks like group chats among friends. I agree with the notion, but I am not sure how someone can build these sorts of environments without just inviting a group of friends and making an echo chamber.
I had couple of fairly diverse group chats and the more sensitive people left real quick. In my experience you can discuss politics or economy among friends with different views but when you touch social issues it gets toxic real fast. Pretty much like on social networks.
