Quoting from the article: “social media trains us to create and post in a manner that pleases the apps’ algorithm. If a post does really well and followers respond well to a certain kind of image or technique, we begin to form a Pavlovian drive to replicate that response.”
That is exactly the point and the main focus of social media, and it’s incredibly dangerous. Don’t take it from me, listen to the people who created big platforms like Facebook:
The moment you use Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and so on and so forth you open the flood gates for all kinds of manipulation of your own behavior and thought processes. It’s hard to spot if you don’t know what you’re looking for but once you’ve seen it it becomes blatantly obvious.
I feel it needs to be said though that Discourse has a few similar social media-like mechanisms: the likes and the notifications system can definitely feed into a ‘habit’, or ‘addiction’ if you like.
I find that they really help me stay on top of things, but sometimes I’m just waiting to see if a ‘like’ will appear :-/
The one thing I hate about likes, is downvoting and not because it hurts my ego, my ego is too big to be hurt
the problem is some stupid site *cough* Hackernews *cough* have this feature that hides the comment if it get some dislikes. That is not rare for me, because my opinions are not very popular with developers. So I have stopped posting on Hackernews because I hate seeing my comments disappear. Even more weird my less weird comments get the most dislikes. Either I am weird or they are.
I asked once “Why is this a problem ?” and my question got 3 dislikes. At least I was surprised.
There is no “incarnation trap”.
It is a passage…
Are you trapped in a vehicle while driving around?
No. In a way you’re liberated - you’re using a tool to fulfill your wish/intent as you’re able and capable. Until an incident/accident happens that prevents you from getting out. Striving for bodied/bodified immortality is such stupidity… that causes “entrapment”. No divine in such being.
I think that Discourse as a platform gets the idea of modern forum right, having said that it would be nice if BA relies on its own infrastructure in the future too as it does now instead of relying on Discourse’s own login and storage setup mainly because of privacy. I see many Discourse setups shifts that to Discourse Co. Once you shift that to Discourse’s headquarters, you loose control of the user data. So in that sense BA does it right in my view.
I would also like to point out that the social media is not just about likes and getting exhausted there by the interaction but there is the privacy aspect along with the user data being used to mine people’s daily lives. And that data is shifted around the globe without your knowledge. For instance Facebook probably can recognize the stuff in your pictures better/faster than you can let alone your emoji filled conversations . So there are hidden and visible realities and costs of being on the social media.
Basically your time on social media is their gain.
One thing to bear in mind is: "do you actually think that sixty thousand people are aware of and interested in you? Why on earth should they be? In my experience, most people are most-interested in just one thing (of course …): themselves.
It used to be that “being known by 60,000 people” would begin to qualify as “famous.” But now a social media platform tells you (through mechanisms known, actually, only to itself …) that you are positively surrounded by thousands of “friends.” Can you say, Pavlovian conditioning?(“Ding!”) Of course you can.
You believe it because you want to – maybe because you think you need to. A musician’s got to get and keep an audience, so Facebook (et al) makes it very easy for them to believe that they must be very active and “push that number up.” (And, when they do what Facebook wants them to do, that number does go up, somehow.)
You see exactly the same principle being used on web-sites in what is euphemistically called, “SEO.” Even though there about 4.5 billion web-sites out there now, and a Google search for “spark plugs” today promises 190 million hits (while actually delivering no more than about seventy …), people magically see what they’ve paid good money to see: two companies in the same podunk town, both of whom sell spark plugs, do a search and guess whose company pops up at or near the top of the list … even when both of them do the search at exactly the same time? To a company like Google, it’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. You’re doing much better than “winning the Powerball® lottery,” every time you search for what you want to see. Simple math says that the odds of your site ever showing up are 190-million to one, but they’re not.
If you weren’t paying attention in Psychology class – especially the section on Mass Psychology – well, you just weren’t paying attention. But the founders of these companies most-certainly were.
There is a saying about friends and real friends that has some truth to it, and while I have no need to hide a body currently, I tend to reserve the term friend for people that have done me a solid in the past.
Aye. Friends aren’t the shallow things that flock to a insta-face-tweet and tell you how wonderful you are no matte how stupid the topic or “selfie”. A friend is someone who I would do a solid for, and they would do a solid for me. no matter the pinch.
I have never had a social media account. I can see the application if all you are interested in life is making money, it can be facilitated for that. But I got better things to do than waste time. Plus I am not a super social person… This forum is all the internet social I get.
In my opinion, face to face interaction is where its at. Its easier to tell someones character thataways, and not have a shallow interaction… Of course I take pictures of my food and show it to whoever I am talking to, and I take “Selfies” and show them. I kinda do “Social media in person”.
One of the problems I have with criticism about social media, even though I am not much of a fan myself, is that people use to reach a “higher moral ground”.
A usual excuse being that because you do not have personal contact with someone being your friend is meaningless. As if we can always be with the people we want. Unfortunately that is not the case, until teleportation is invented, we all have friends that are living in great distance in some case it may take years to meet. Not to exclude the meaningful friendship one can make online and meet in real life later one.
Hilarious is the criticism about selfies, as if during the 80s we did not have huge albums that we were sharing with friends and relative every time they took a visit. People have been making selfies for thousands of years via various mediums. Paintings and sculptures being the most popular. Capturing the most mundane every day tasks.
An argument with double standard is no argument at all. Social media is a mere small step of evolution in the tens of thousands of years evolution of human behavior.“Human vanity” can be traced not only back to the stone age but even animals with a tiny fraction of our intelligence. Modern humans are not remotely as special (even in a bad way) as they think they are. If anything facebook and twitter is nothing more than a manifestation of billions of years of genetic evolution.
You are correct. It truly is a transcendent experience to not have social media in my life
Anyways, sarcasm aside. In this forum you kinda start to get a idea of who and what people are. But even those who I respect I wouldn’t consider my “friend”. (brief obvious note to make the lawyers happy: We should respect everyones opinion, even if they disagree with you. They are a person.) In fact, the amount of people that I know face to face that I consider my friends is a very small list. We should be a friend to everyone though. just because you can count on someone else doesn’t give excuse to not be a friend to them. Yes people have great friends online, yes folks have friends and family long distance that social media helps connect. everyone has there thing, and its not mine.
I wasn’t around in the 80’s, so I am not personally familiar with the culture of that decade. In the 90’s my folks had albums that they would personally look through. I cant remember sharing them with any visitors or what. But each family has its own dynamic of how they work.
Kilon, I am having trouble thinking of where to start with the last comment. Correct me if I am wrong, but how I read your comment is, “people have been self absorbed and selfish for years, so why stop now?”
There’s a race between two tipping points. The tipping point of the public consciousness, which we want to see, and the tipping point in the climate system that we don’t want to see and that we’re coming perilously close to.
As on the inside so is the outside and vice versa.
I still think the “deletion” was an act of selfishness & arrogance or inability to handle the mental pressure (grand delusion) - tool could be used to good cause, if only ‘person’ was capable of using it effectively (to achieve “positive” results).
I believe we must somehow show we are against murdering our collective soul by being proactive with real deeds, stop talking and writing too much, diffusing the centralized industrial power and split empires before they ruin everything. So we are the bricks, but individualized after all.
More in general, I understood that the web, as it is composed, emphasizes dualism, and therefore what we are, manifesting ourselves with everything we create, bringing things online, creating in evil and in the good of projections on who is reading us and who we read, but in a way strongly detached from reality and that has to do with the individualistic relationship of those who read us and their imaginary vision that we make of ourselves or that we make of others based on what we project as a mask and extension of ourselves…
These concepts during the years that I have practiced the net I had to observe them and then to study them for good … and only now I succeed partly not to be prejudicial and to make less projections on the others of things that belong only to my unconscious and very personal constructions of my vision of reality.
And from this perspective, it is obvious that collective movements, especially in social networks can create great damage if you are not careful …
Because where there is great light there is consequently a great shadow,
and managing positively and psychologically these great energies is not a simple thing.
Are you sure about that, as massive technological advancement is a very recent thing as far as human history is concerned (less than 150 years since electricity started getting put to practical use). The theory of evolution meanwhile is largely about things changing slowly, very slowly.
As I alluded to earlier, one of the real issues of social media is that people use it to create a circle of random people which are not really your friends, you don’t know them and many of them are willing to knock you down if you say or post something dumb (not help you in your stumbles like a good physical friend). The internet is very good at bringing out the absolute worst in humanity and many simply don’t know who they are friending.
A somewhat more cynical view here. With likes/retweets/etc. of less importance, the new measure seems to be how loudly you can announce you’re not on social media (using it naturally).
