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.

lemmy does have problems though. Lots of emotional, judgemental and brigading content still. But it’s less here than elsewhere, probably.

It has. Discussions here are mostly, just like elsewhere, people throwing arrogant smartass-looking text at each other and refusing to elaborate or explain or reason. Due to the experience of getting into such, people who’d actually discuss something instead “money-first” post with a set of markers hinting at their opinions and possible arguments, and masquerade discussion as agreement. It’s only a little less exhausting than going into a shit-throwing contest, even if more rewarding.

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.

Lemmy is social media. So is Mastodon. So is peer tube. And everything else in the fediverse.

So I wouldn’t compare social media to a gun, across the board.

Social media hasn’t been designed to cause these problems, though. It’s more a babelfish thing.

Veerry interesting, yes…

It magnifies the worst in people.

From my point of view something that brings out the worst in us sounds like a really big part of the issue.

We’ve always been modified by our situations, so why not create better situations rather than lamenting that we don’t have the grit to break through whatever toxic society we find ourselves graphed onto?

Sorry I know I’m putting a lot on your comment that I know you didn’t mean, but I see this kind of unintentional crypto doomerism a lot. I think it holds people to an unhealthy standard.

The reason why it brings out the worst in people is because it has open borders. You can shit into the network and move on. If you were forced to stay and live with your shit, you’d shit less into the public domain. That means small networks, harder to move to other/new networks, …

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.

If you read the article, the argument they are making is that you cannot fix social media by simply tweaking the algorithm. We need a new form of social media that is not just everyone screaming into the void for attention, which includes Lemmy, Mastodon, and other Fediverse platforms.

Seriously, read her books. I looooove „The Dispossessed“

This is spot on. The issue with any system is that people don’t pay attention to the incentives.

When a surgeon earns more if he does more surgeries with no downside, most surgeons in that system will obviously push for surgeries that aren’t necessary. How to balance incentives should be the main focus on any system that we’re part of.

You can pretty much understand someone else’s behavior by looking at what they’re gaining or what problem they’re avoiding by doing what they’re doing.

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.