• Fosheze@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Social media is just gossip refined and people have always liked gossip. But social media is to gossip what heroin is to poppy seeds.

    • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      I mean, it’s not like social media doomerism is some mandatory thing. The internet shows us what we want to see - if someone wants to spend their whole life reading about every possible bad thing in the world, that’s on them.

      • Zwiebel@feddit.org
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        5 months ago

        Social media companies use predatory tactics that abuse our knowledge of the human psyche to pull people into social media. It’s not the fair choice you make it out to be

        • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          As someone that doesn’t use social media outside of Lemmy, it’s really not as hard as people seem to make it out to be.

        • Agent641@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Old media did this too. Newspapers, yellow rags, pulp fiction, special interest magazines. Chock full of physiology-abusing tricks.

        • Katana314@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I’ll also add that the other people around you use social media - so if you want contact, it’s now harder than it used to be since fewer people are eager to strike up an anonymous conversation.

          This has especially ruined dating.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        The Internet used to show us what we wanted to see. Now it shows us what it thinks we will most engage with even if it is not what we most want to see. So if the algorithm figures out that a person on engages well with right-wing media sources, that’s what it will show them more of. It doesn’t matter what that person’s politics are, all that matters is that the algorithm has figured out what the user will most engage with.

        And that is how reality is being rewritten with fantasy in real time.

        • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          If someone is engaging in a certain kind of content, I would argue that’s the content they want to see. It might not be what they enjoy seeing, or what’s good for them, but you can’t seek out right wing content and then tell me you don’t want to see right wing content. At some point, there has to be a level of personal liability here.

            • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              Is that supposed to be some grand statement? Yeah, I enjoy occasionally posting on stuff like this - never said otherwise.

              • Clent@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                No, see they are miserable so you must be miserable.

                They don’t want to not engage with these services that they know manipulate them but choose to do so anyway but deny any responsibility for their own actions because those same algorithms told them they aren’t responsible.

            • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              If they’re getting inundated with it to the point it’s affecting their actual mental health, then they obviously need to change something. Whether it’s the quantity or the quality of the content they consume. Logging off and going outside is always an option.

              • lone_faerie
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                5 months ago

                Well now you’re just contradicting yourself. If someone is getting inundated with certain content that it’s affecting their mental health, then that’s not content they want to see. That’s like saying if someone is being bullied, it’s because they want to be bullied otherwise they’d change.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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                5 months ago

                Logging off and going outside is always an option.

                For the rest of their lives?

                And I thought this was what they wanted to see?