should we ban social media?

I'm just sad that basically nobody I know personally actually uses the fediverse

oooOOOooooo look at this one, they know people personally.

I might be in favor of banning for-profit social media, or at least regulating it more firmly and protecting consumers, and keeping people like Zuckerberg from using it to influence elections... Somehow. If that's not practical, I'll revert to supporting a ban.

Ban algorithmic social media.

Chasing the algorithm is toxic as fuck.

I feel like an algorithm that sucks you in is what makes a social media platform popular. But an algorithm is part of what makes social media so toxic.

I love that the fediverse doesn't have ulterior motives, but that might be why it never becomes mainstream. I'd choose smaller crowd over toxic tho.

I am in favor of banning the profit based mode of production. This includes social media in its current popular forms

Banning means for people to communicate?

Yeah that can't possibly backfire.

"if i have a message to share, i go where people are."

really good reminder for all the people who want to push fedi to strangers on the internet :)

work with communities and content creators!

If you want to get people to join the fediverse, I think the best way is to point out where it shines, not necessarily in relation to other social media. I've gotten a couple of friends to sign up for Lemmy because of how trans-friendly it is, especially on Blåhaj Zone. It's such a breath of fresh air from the rampant transphobia on mainstream social media platforms.

I think it's important to distinguish between social media in general and specific platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Don't say things like "social media is designed to <blank>" when you really mean "Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit are designed to <blank>".

The first step to fixing a problem is to identify it clearly and accurately.

The problems with social media in practice have little to do with the general concept of social media. There are ways we could regulate our way to a better internet, by heavily disincentivizing dark patterns, and still have thriving social media platforms.

IMHO, there are a couple things to focus on:

1. Restrict or outright ban data collection, sale, and sharing. Targeted advertising is not necessary for a healthy internet. It's gotten completely out of control. Fuck you and your 872 closest partners.

2. Mandate transparency in algorithms. Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. have all manipulated their users by gaming their algorithms to maximize engagement, promote political ideas, or even outright conduct psychological experiments on unwitting users. There's no need for a sorting algorithm to be opaque to the user. It's feasible for it to be user-customizable to one degree or another.

Whilst I don't think we could ban it if we wanted to, I do think that a focus less on either commercialising social media or commercial social media in general with their algorithms etc would be better for people's mental health.

That is not to say that non commercial social is better inherently, it is all about the attitude people come to it with, getting away from the virality, fame and poorly thought out opinions and misinformation, working on bigotries and self esteem and developing community and genuine friendship with a diverse array of people would create a better social media and world in general.

Sadly not even the fediverse is at all close to that yet, perhaps it will be one day, but there are still so many folks with ideas around what social media should be for that they haven't dropped their ideas that make it untenable and unbearable, they also haven't let go of a lot of their bigotries and don't listen when told otherwise, that and even with the best of intentions it can still create low self-esteem with edited media or people only showing you their 'best' sides, even without algorithms.

Social media should be about improving the world and ourselves, but it has a long way to go to create that mindset and to reward it, even the fediverse.

Alice says that the fear response is dangerous because it can get people to get drawn in by reactionaries, but fear is often legitimate. It's a visceral signal to remove yourself from the dangerous situation (such as social media), into a position where you can evaluate your options safely.

Fear becomes dangerous if you are unable to escape it for a long time, if you hold on to it, or if it is misdirected so you end up trying to remove the wrong things. If you are posting about social media about how bad social media is, fear is detrimental, but if you find yourself unable to cut down on social media even though you want to, fear is valid and proportional.

... yeah, it is horrifying how I'm on here spending limited introverted energy speaking with strangers through text, and then don't have the energy to organize stuff with friends offline. I'm gonna go now.

I tried commenting on Youtube to bring up the idea of the fediverse. However, my comments are not shown. Does anyone know how Youtube blocks comments?

I think the brand of social media that is designed solely for as much engagement as possible should be gone forever. Forum based social sites where moderation can be more tailored to the groups involved and community owned social media needs to come back. People act as if they can't live without the social media we have today but that is just bullshit... we literally did fine with that a decade ago.

Permanently Deleted

Should we ban social media?

Sure, let's start with this youtube video.