Posted by skm 3 hours ago
I feel like the real problem is the people. Many of us just want to be told what to think to blend in with society, some of us demonstrate Dunning-Kruger publicly and a few of us really want to drive the polarization for clout and attention.
Everyday I see people promote increasingly stupid ideas on both sides, further pushing my believe that the only solution is to severely limit what government can do, therefore making all this discussion pointless.
The only point I'd add is that it's not handling time evolution in wicked problems quite right. Agree that the noisy room is distorting the world in exactly the ways described. But what if we've been in there so long, and the world has become so distorted.. that reality itself slides towards the once-extreme positions? Easiest to see this with climate-change controversy since that is the way that sort of thing happens, regardless of whether you think it's happened yet. Cascade, phase change, and collapse don't just call a truce.
So you have to anticipate that, acknowledging the pessimist is actually right, and that systems are a real bitch. Then you point out that if we're already doomed, we have nothing to lose nothing by trying. Systems are complex after all, that's the whole problem.. so if we miscalculated on the doom, then bothering to try actually saves us. Checkmate pessimists.
- how you does this handle the fact that a lot of accounts on social media platforms are bots that maybe controlled by a small number of people.
- how do we actually get this implemented?
And the money decides how to run the circus. Not for the benefit of all.
So it is a really hard problem.
It's obvious from the hyperbole around the discourse alone that this moral panic has reached levels of derangement that far outclass any rational basis for judgement.
Does social media have negative consequences? Sure. Are people assholes on the internet? Always have been. Is social media the greatest and most existentially perilous evil ever conceived by humankind? No.
I think in ten years people will look back at this (on whatever strictly censored and regulated internet replaces this one) with the same bemused confusion as we do the Satanic Panic. And honestly in forty years, if technological civilization still exists, we'll find out how much of that was stoked by the CIA or other interests.
I mean wtf.
The tiny minority dominates the feeds because that's how the incentives for algorithmic driven social media are structured. Do we really expect Meta, X, TikTok to anything that could reduce engagement?
Good luck having any of the mainstream social media apps add the banner they propose.
This is showing how in the social media system the dynamics play out.
Both Democrats and Republicans estimated 30% but actually.. only 10% of both sides supported political violence
That number is crazy in so many ways and the post is overly nonchalant about it. The "distortion" isn't what's worrying here
I just had an issue with the way that number was completely overlooked