Social Media is a Net Negative to the World

[Blotto 23434]

58 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Would love to watch the reaction on the kids face while some 50 year old teaches them about social media. 
 

This is one of those ideas that you nod you head at instinctively and then the implementation is totally non productive if not counterproductive. 

I nominate dr rick. 

[atomheartbevo 89449]

4 hours ago, crash_davis said:

social media amplified one of man's worst traits: insecurity and with it the need for validation.

it's' a vicious circle. the people whom i know post like mad on social media are insecure as hell. when their posts do not get the numbers of likes they are expecting, they get sad and more insecure. then they feel the need to post another video so that maybe this time they can get that validation. it's like their self worth has become a repeated test to validate their self worth. in zen speak, the harder they try to hold it, the more it slips from their hands.

we are seeing mental illness and cries for help disguised in tictoks and tweets.

Surly and other bulletin boards/forums are social media platforms.

[atomheartbevo 89449]

4 hours ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

I think it's worth noting that the people have trouble with SM are ones that were alive before its inception. The newer generations do not seem to be as gullible and susceptible to misinformation as people older than them. So really, this is a problem with Gen X and back. Seems like it might not be such problem in a decade or two. That does assume there is even a society to participate in 20 years down the road.

The Social Dilemma documentary touched on a lot of it.

A lot of the older folks are looking for something to validate their beliefs, and social media doe it automatically by feeding them what they want.  They are also getting support for saying stupid shit outloud, that they might not have gotten in the past.

For instance, in the past, the UFO nuts and other conspiracy theorists, kept a lot of their stuff on the down low - their ads were in the back of local magazines, their meetings in back rooms of small bookstores.  Social media got them and the qanon shit out there in front of the average citizen.

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20344]

I noticed this on Facebook today. Perhaps it will make a difference. Probably not.




 

[RDCanecutter 26281]

1 hour ago, UpperWestside said:

We need a class taught in high school, a REQUIRED CLASS mind you, on social media. There are already classes available in college for this. Social media is a force that has mostly caused a decline in the psyche of the average person which is suboptimal to say the least. 

I have a different idea, to reach the same goal:

Don't TEACH the kids anything. Instead, have an elite strike force of Old People who identify and then co-opt every single thing the youth are doing, like, within a week of it starting to trend. The kids will not be able to throw their phones far enough away, and within a fortnight will be reading Jane Austen and corresponding with paper letters written in the most elegant cursive.

[Biff Tannen 45497]

32 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Surly and other bulletin boards/forums are social media platforms.

We’ve discussed this ad nauseum. No it’s not. 

[Buzzrock 14871]

Yes it is.

[atomheartbevo 89449]

2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

We’ve discussed this ad nauseum. No it’s not. 

1 hour ago, Buzzrock said:

Yes it is.

I was on/ran BBSes in the early 90s and later usenet.  Those BBSes definitely weren't.  But Surly and a lot of other online forums?  They are.

We maybe fairly homogenous, and our content and community maybe organized slightly different, but Surly has the built-in means to share and discuss content on Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, and twitter.  We can upvote and downvote content, content can be promoted, etc.

There are literally buttons on every single post to share our content across the internet to other social media platforms.

[Anastasis 23394]

This is more of a community, than twitter, facebook, etc.  They are all social media, and probably all toxic to certain extent, but facebook and twitter take the psychological manipulation to 11. To the extent that twitter embeds have replaced real exchanges of thoughts and ideas here, it has been to this boards detriment. 

[Anastasis 23394]

And by "here", I mean the 20 or so year migratory history across the boards. 

[UpperWestside 6136]

38 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I was on/ran BBSes in the early 90s and later usenet.  Those BBSes definitely weren't.  But Surly and a lot of other online forums?  They are.

We maybe fairly homogenous, and our content and community maybe organized slightly different, but Surly has the built-in means to share and discuss content on Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, and twitter.  We can upvote and downvote content, content can be promoted, etc.

There are literally buttons on every single post to share our content across the internet to other social media platforms.

I can see how this place is looked at as a social media platform. I do think that there is an actual community of people who, unlike Twitter, Facebook or to an extent Instagram, talk with each other and are not being fed a toxic stream of media manipulation. I look at message board communities as technically being social media, but in a separate designation. 

[staboner 4959]

here isn't social media, but still is problematic in its own right. echo chambers, etc

on the flip side at least some of us pay attention to certain users and we have some sembalnce of memory and nuance, versus just a one way blast of the same shit over and over

[atomheartbevo 89449]

5 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

I can see how this place is looked at as a social media platform. I do think that there is an actual community of people who, unlike Twitter, Facebook or to an extent Instagram, talk with each other and are not being fed a toxic stream of media manipulation. I look at message board communities as technically being social media, but in a separate designation. 

If we didn't have the share buttons for the other social media platforms, didn't have the voting up-or-down engagement, and a bunch of our stuff was private (not visible unless logged in), I wouldn't be quick to label us as such.

[staboner 4959]

31 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

And by "here", I mean the 20 or so year migratory history across the boards. 

 

[Brisketexan 104628]

So, you DO know he went to Oklahoma freakshow and I am the idoit? Interesting.

[Hate 20103]

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

I was on/ran BBSes in the early 90s and later usenet.  Those BBSes definitely weren't.  But Surly and a lot of other online forums?  They are.

We maybe fairly homogenous, and our content and community maybe organized slightly different, but Surly has the built-in means to share and discuss content on Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, and twitter.  We can upvote and downvote content, content can be promoted, etc.

There are literally buttons on every single post to share our content across the internet to other social media platforms.

Negged!

[Biff Tannen 45497]

No algorithm deciding who sees what = not social media for all intents and purposes when comparing to Facebook, et al. 

[956 Worldwide 34444]

12 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Definitely some of this. When it comes to SM, the younger folks have a much stronger bullshit detector for SM bullshit.

Man, I don't know. I am in the generation that first broadly adopted social media (I was late and patchwork compared to most of my friends)-- I did not do MySpace, browsed HotorNot in my dorm, was part of the .edu generation to adopt Facebook, remember the launch of Twitter, etc. It has been really bizarre to watch my peer group's behavor. I've seen people who started out using Facebook for normal things like party invites and photos slide down the rabbit hole to MLM schemes, essential oils, crypto scams, and then full-on conspiracy and disinformation posting. I first started to feel like an old when I saw high school classmates posting shit that belongs in the "Dumbass shit we see on Facebook" thread.

There will be something that comes along and messes with every generation's heads. 

[Goredho 17349]

7 hours ago, Anastasis said:

This is more of a community, than twitter, facebook, etc.  They are all social media, and probably all toxic to certain extent, but facebook and twitter take the psychological manipulation to 11. To the extent that twitter embeds have replaced real exchanges of thoughts and ideas here, it has been to this boards detriment. 

 

5 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

No algorithm deciding who sees what = not social media for all intents and purposes when comparing to Facebook, et al. 

What is interesting are how many in this community self-impose an algorithm to control what their brains are presented with.

try

  If self.conservativeLeaning

    click dailyTexan

    consumeAndProject politicalIdeas

  else

    click cloakRoom

    consumeAndProject politicalIdeas

catch infoError

  ignoreUser infoError.postAuthor

 

Collectively, we welcome the psychological manipulation that social media provides.  Yeah, Twitter, Facebook, et al are abject assholes culpable in the fucking up of a perfectly good western democracy, but it’s the citizenry that had to put the crack pipe to their lips and take a long draw.

But me?  I’m above all that, man.

*takes a massive bong hit while consumingAndProjecting politicalIdeas*

That’ll be another $9.95.

Edited July 1, 2021 by Goredho

[Buzzrock 14871]

No algorithm deciding who sees what = not social media for all intents and purposes when comparing to Facebook, et al. 

No algorithm (that we’re aware of), but it does have another one of the Internet’s great enablers: anonymity. Which makes it prone to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.



Definitely social media.

[WhatTheBuck 28713]

On 6/30/2021 at 11:10 PM, atomheartbevo said:

If we didn't have the share buttons for the other social media platforms, didn't have the voting up-or-down engagement, and a bunch of our stuff was private (not visible unless logged in), I wouldn't be quick to label us as such.

I wouldn’t say the buttons linking this site to the big social media networks has anything to do with making it a social media site. Nor the reputation buttons. Before the advent of up and down votes, regular participants of any community, regardless of the medium, still developed reputations within that community. I’d argue that what we typically mean by “social media” are the new big corporate networks where content is fed to you by algorithms or people gauge their popularity by the number of their followers. But if you argue that this site is social media then I’d agree that it technically is, but so were BBS’s and Usenet newsgroups and internet mailing lists and, hell, even CB radio in the 70’s, primitive though that might have been. I’ve met more people live and in person and benefitted more from participating on internet mailing lists than any other platform and didn’t need any up or down votes to know who was to be respected and trusted. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

The following is slightly off topic, but I don't wish to make a topic specifically for Gab. 

I'm apologizing for the screenshot versus embed, I think Twitter wants me to create an account and I'm not going to do that, but they won't let me post the thread like I used to.

Anyway, Andrew Torba, the founder, put everything in house after being deplatformed and invited everyone to join in his no holds barred " censor-free" mediaverse. They have their own "television" and other bubbles where they have "news" and memes and you all are familiar with that.

So, Andrew had a little antisemetic meltdown apparently, and quit his Twitter account (where he advertised Gab). It's worth noting that he attracts a lot of evangelicals to his platform and has a "Jews killed Jesus" vibe on Gab but it attracted some attention  that caused the whole fracas--he got into a spat with some users and things got too hot for him.

 

[Guest Lobo]

On 6/30/2021 at 9:22 PM, atomheartbevo said:

 

There are literally buttons on every single post to share our content across the internet to other social media platforms.

I reported one post in my time on here because some asshole dropped my wife and I's real names in a drunken stupor about 3 years ago.  But I honestly never knew that you could just push out a post to social media using that other drop-down feature.  That seems kinda weird, but I had no idea it even existed.  Mind Blown.  

If this site counts as social media, then I guess I'm on social media.  But I would contend it does not count as social media.  If you consider "Six Degrees" as the first social media platform open to the public, it's now 25 years of social media.  And we are worse off for it.  I know it's a cliche thing to say on here, but I've never had (again, if you don't count surly/shaggy/hornfans/LFZ/et.al.) a single social media account in all that time. 

This place is a demented community, if anything.  A halfway house for people needing written-form redemption.  And it's attached to a place I love, the University of Texas.  Only things I love more are my family and Jesus and their social media platforms stink.  

Edited October 20, 2021 by Lobo

[Hornius Emeritus 12420]

Social Media has an actual definition, as ordained by the Oxford English Dictionary:

so·cial me·di·a
/ˌsōSHəl ˈmēdēə/

noun

1) websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.



SurlyHorns is DEFINITELY social media. 

Also, have y'all read about Raya?  It's private social media. I would like to be invited.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/raya-and-the-promise-of-private-social-media

[Guest Lobo]

Are you that fucking guy that starts every meeting with, "Oxford English Dictionary defines 'Teamwork' as........"???

[Nice Guy Eddie 13414]

If it makes someone feel better about themselves, then cool Surly isn't social media. But it is.

The term itself is fairly meaningless as it encompasses so much of online interaction now.

[atomheartbevo 89449]

9 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Are you that fucking guy that starts every meeting with, "Oxford English Dictionary defines 'Teamwork' as........"???

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20344]

Humans are a net negative to the world.

Social media is just a reflection of that. 

[Neonmoon 38127]

8 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Humans are a net negative to the world.

Social media is just a reflection of that.