Technology

Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread? The internet is so vast, social media makes up a tiny sliver of it.

Because to most people outside Lemmy the "internet" (by which they mean the world wide web but that's me being a pedant) IS social media. There might as well not be anything outside the walled gardens of social media to them because they've been conditioned to only stay on one, maybe two platforms for years at this point. The old "what's a browser?" question these days gets answered with "I don't need a browser I have Facebook". Completely nonsensical to us but to them it's totally natural. Not being derogatory about them or anything but the 60k lemmy users and however many million on Reddit are not the majority. Facebook with it's 3 billion (with a b) users, IS the majority of the internet.

The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google. As they shape your content, lock you out of areas and generally dictate what’s “legal” or even what gets found during your searches.

I agree the Google and MS are a problem, but Facebook, Twitter, Reddit are also a problem, albeit a different one.

Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread?

Because when people say the internet sucks, they're not talking about TCP/IP or HTTPS or SSH or FTP. They're talking about their experience interacting with websites and other people online, i.e. the social aspects, essentially the World Wide Web portion (but also hardware as a service). Everything you mentioned is in that tiny sliver, and is what people take issue with.

the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google

and cloudflare

The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google

I think the real problem is that the entire Internet is basically just a dozen multi-billion Big Tech companies and the entire "Internet economy" is so tightly weaved into advertising money.

I mostly agree with you.

But I also think it's important to think of the neighbors we disagree with very differently than how we view right wing politicians and corporate executives. Our neighbors may have some shitty opinions and ignorant positions, but they might be decent people at heart. No right wing politician or billionaire CEO is going to be decent at heart.

People who want to destroy democracy are influenced by their brain too. But they do react more extremely than others.

The thesis here is consistent with people believing political violence is justified, with human brain's tendency to form a "us vs them" mentality. But it doesn't explain why some act more extreme and violently.

People react differently because of multiple factors, such as living through different circumstances, different cultures, being more or less subject to cognitive biases, seing more or less misinformation, ... For instance if you see more misinformation about polical adversary being evil, AND your biases and culture makes you more likely to believe it.

That isn't an excuse for any violence. Understanding these mechanisms may help prevent reduce violence or hate. That's a worthy goal even if some groups have a much greater responsibility for political violence.

I was posting low effort messages on BBS's back in the 80s, and on the Usenet through the 90's. The tradition continues.

Eternal September

I completely agree with your assessment especially with how most social media these days really dumbs down the entry level effort needed to participate in discussions.

And to your point, participating on a BBS (which usually requires a more specific interest and consequently a similar engagement level) will generally reward you with a community that is more civil, friendly and worth frequenting.

I don't know why you would think they're paid media or propaganda. It's not like they've been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a "philanthropic" organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of "effective altruism," an ideology which functionally equates to "let's try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality," and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It's also not like they've been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.

Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s

Have you read the sources? They are below the video. If you have, does the video misrepresent what's in the sources?

They've always been pretty transparent about that kind of thing though haven't they?

I don't think they're denying the filter bubble exists, just giving a different theory on why things have turned bad.

They are correct in the current interpretation of the effects of social media. Recent research has absolutely been pointing away from filter bubbles being a thing.

The video includes an ad near the end. Like most video on YouTube, its creator rely on sponsors. Unfortunately they also placed the same ad at the beginning of the description. It's kind of repulsive if the first thing you look at is the description.

I wish I could scrub or remove the ad from the description, but it's automatically imported and I don't see how to remove it.

Algorithm-free solves a lot of problems.

YouTube has this thing where you can set multiple thumbnails (it will show a different one every time YouTube displays it) and see which one gets the most clicks, then use that one.

The bickering was dumber and less serious but there was plenty of it on the newsgroups lol.