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
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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they could still do with some fixing
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?
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.
Does making horrible horrible things in CK2 count as creation? If not I am simply creating a mess of my life.
Yeah its sad computing is dying because of ipads. Lot of people.dont even have a computer.
Yes.
Whatchu gonna do about it?
~(not asking specifically you, bridge, just didn't want to leave the thread at a circle jerk)~
But what we find is that it's not just that this content spreads; it also shapes the network structures that are formed. So there's feedback between the effective emotional action of choosing to retweet something and the network structure that emerges. And then in turn, you have a network structure that feeds back what content you see, resulting in a toxic network. The definition of an online social network is that you have this kind of posting, reposting, and following dynamics. It's quite fundamental to it. That alone seems to be enough to drive these negative outcomes.
Trying to grasp it in my own words;
Because social networks are about interactions and networks (follows, communities, topics, instances), they inherently human nature establish toxic networks.
Even when not showing content through engagement-based hot or active metrics, interactions will push towards networking effects of central players/influencers and filter and trigger bubbles.
If there were no voting, no followable accounts or communities, it would not be a social network anymore (by their definition).
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.
(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!
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.
As long as you know you're in an echo chamber there's nothing wrong with it. Everything is an echo chamber of varying sizes.
Social media isn’t broken. It’s working exactly how it was meant to. We just need to break free of it.
first of all, it's a broad overgeneralization to assume that all social media is created with the intention to manipulate people. there was honest people running social media, but it's long past. (in the corporate domain)
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social media can be useful if it presents non-emotional, non-brigading content. rational discourse is one of the valuable options possible. throwing away the whole internet because Xitter sucks is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
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but yes, social media is the new Volksempfänger and manipulates people (social engineering)
No social media was created to manipulate people. (Most) social media is a business, optimised to make money. You make money by showing people ads. You can show more ads to people if they stay on the platform longer. You can make people stay longer by engaging them emotionally. End of conspiracy...
also propaganda is just political ads, and the way companies make money on the internet is by showing ads ..
Facebook got their seed money from Peter Thiel. They also employ a lot of ex CIA. So not sure about the no conspiracy thing.
Also the millions they take in creating targeted political ads in order to manipulate their users and influence elections isn't a conspiracy. How they met with the President, kissed his ring, and then went all in on right wing content.
Yeah no conspiracy here, just keep walking
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.
They left entirely? Not just tuned out the group until the topic of conversation moved on?
It kind of always circled back so they left after couple of times. But I'm sure it depends on the group. If the group serves some purpose (like organizing some meetups) people definitely stay for longer. If it's for talking shit I don't think it works well. Same like social media.
There's actually some interesting research behind this - Dunbar's number suggests humans can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships, which is why those smaller networks tend to work better psychologicaly than the massive free-for-alls we've built.
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.
Lemmy doesn't have a neural net prediction/recommendation engine. This is a HUGE difference.
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!
Exactly. Once we are a mainstream page to visit, it will go down as fast as any other page like this before.
That's the real benefit of the Fediverse. Even if one instance becomes known for hosting bots, we can defederate them. Each instance isn't the population of the whole. Plus, we don't need to be huge. There's no benefit from it.
My prediction is that manually reviewing user creation won't scale to a high level and unless systems develop spam detection and reputation management similar to email then it's not going to be limited to just one or two bad instances.
Its trivial to create my own instance with a new domain and there's no limitations against sending ActivityPub messages to a server. Unfortunately the simplest fix is for big instances to restrict what instances can communicate to it, but that causes centralization.
Plus, we don't need to be huge. There's no benefit from it.
The benefit is breadth and depth of communities. Reddit is great because if you are interested in a topic, there's a bunch of people talking about it.
yes, and no. what really Facebook lacks (along the top social medias) is strong negative feedback.
I don't think the village idiot is going that far with the flat earth conspiracy when is publicly downvoted to oblivion
I beg to disagree.
The reason all these delusional posts getting even upvoted to begin with is due to many like-minded people are gathered together in the same sub. As an example, reddit's r/democrats and r/republicans. One is clearly more sane than another, yet try to say something in a wrong sub - get downvoted to oblivion. But if you spill your delusional shit in a r/republicans - upvotes galore and comments of praise.
Facebook groups are the same shit. And so is Lemmy. One thing in hexbear that is allowed could/will be the reason you got a ban in .world. Up/Downvotes cant fix that.
tl;dr Village idiots can join together to accumulate their own conspiracies in a big ass circlejerk, and social media has no power to stop 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
Seriously, read her books. I looooove „The Dispossessed“
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.
The article is mostly an interview with one of the researchers that produced the study. Don't like the headline? Fine. Just read what that researcher has to say.
That's not an excuse to have a false and misleading headline.
The original source is here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385
Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? 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. We create a minimal platform where agents can post, repost, and follow others. We find that the resulting following-networks reproduce three well-documented dysfunctions: (1) partisan echo chambers; (2) concentrated influence among a small elite; and (3) the amplification of polarized voices – creating a “social media prism” that distorts political discourse. We test six proposed interventions, from chronological feeds to bridging algorithms, finding only modest improvements – and in some cases, worsened outcomes. These results suggest that core dysfunctions may be rooted in the feedback between reactive engagement and network growth, raising the possibility that meaningful reform will require rethinking the foundational dynamics of platform architecture.
The linked article also includes an interview. At least in this case, it's not only a rephrasing of the paper or paper abstract.
(Just pointing it out here so people don't skip the article while thinking there's nothing else there.)
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
lemmy does have problems though. Lots of emotional, judgemental and brigading content still. But it's less here than elsewhere, probably.
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.
Did you read the article? Their findings were that not using such algorithms did not have the expected effect. That social networks themselves, by their nature, lead to similar network, filter, and trigger effects. Chronological order made it worse, not better, apparently.
The engagement driven algorithms making it worse seems intuitive. So I'm surprised and skeptical too. I haven't read their paper, only the article/interview.
Facebook was pretty boring before they tried to make money. Still ick, but mostly just people posting pictures of activities with family or friends.
Exactly, the one big issue with the modern world is the algorithms pushing for engagement as the only important metric.
We're on the solution right now, lmao