geekhack
geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: tp4tissue on Fri, 22 July 2022, 21:45:30
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Social media costs money. They have an agenda.
For example, Reddi7, is a demo(rat stronghold. Its format goes like this.
- Hate repub1icans, <stressor>
- Funny remark/video, <stress relief transition>
- Cat ____________ <dopamine hit>
Abortion
Funny
Cat
Trvmp is a bastard
B1den victim of Covid.
Cat
In this way, they are PROGRAMING the audience to lean a certain way, hate certain people, buy something, vote some way. If you go to another platform that's repub1i(an, it's the same format.
How do ya'll deprogram ??
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I try not to get programmed in the first place. I may click on Reddit when searching for info on something specific but would never look at the "top stories" or whatever they call them any more than I would watch (someone's biassed version of) the news. I made a facebook account last year to inform everyone I was camping with at the festival that I had covid and that involved joining a group, and aside from looking at the occasional band or local company for info the group is all I look at.
Knowing everything that's wrong in the world is the quickest way to the depths of depression so while I know it's not good my approach to living is very much small scale and stick my head in the sand to the big stuff.
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I guess the first mistake is browsing the more popular/default subreddits (or indeed browsing Twitter/etc generically).
It's not always easy to judge the sincerity of internet posts, since there are all kinds of factors in why someone might say something—including stating things they don't believe (which itself can range from trolling, deception to fitting in with a group due to other benefits it brings despite the downside of creating echo chambers).
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The Algorithm is designed to build consensus towards whatever "ends" the platform is serving.
So, it's not just echo chamber, it's deliberate programming, in that regardless of what you believe going in, they can manipulate information in a certain order (stress, transition, cat video) and degree of superficial validity (votes) to CHANGE OUR MINDS..
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it's not just echo chamber, it's deliberate programming, in that regardless of what you believe going in, they can manipulate information in a certain order (stress, transition, cat video) and degree of superficial validity (votes) to CHANGE OUR MINDS.
The counter-argument if this weren't just a result of echo chambers (eg: politics) or existing popular content (eg: cats) would be sites will of course want more ad impressions if that's their business model so more engagement = more impressions. Anything (to a certain degree and based on what they know their userbase will tolerate) they've found that that generates more engagement is promoted.
So while they could of course manipulate things to influence reader thinking in certain directions by design I could see the counter-argument being argued as occam's razor.
My thinking is probably somewhere in the middle, in that we know from various leaks/etc that big sites manually manipulate trending topics in various cases and it would also be convenient for interested parties with enough influence to use such platforms to spread messaging*, however it's also plausible knowing how groupthink can occur in online circles that it's a 'natural' outcome and the sites take advantage of the engagement and lean into the most vocal biases of the userbase.
* Should also mention here eg: GCHQ's JTRIG leak which outlined explicit psychological methods designed to persuade online communities.
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Social media costs money. They have an agenda.
The agenda is to make money. That simple.
Once Google realized that clicks themselves could be monetized a fundamental paradigm of the human race cracked.
This book is getting pretty old but it still holds presciently true.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/ten-arguments-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now-jaron-lanier (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/ten-arguments-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now-jaron-lanier)
TL;DR
"Neo-Marxians would have something to say about capital in all this but Lanier emphatically doesn’t claim to have all the answers. “Please take what you can use from me. I know I don’t know everything,” he says in a winsome footnote.
His most dispiriting observations are those about what social media does to politics – biased, “not towards the left or right, but downwards”. If triggering emotions is the highest prize, and negative emotions are easier to trigger, how could social media not make you sad?"
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My thinking is probably somewhere in the middle, in that we know from various leaks/etc that big sites manually manipulate trending topics in various cases and it would also be convenient for interested parties with enough influence to use such platforms to spread messaging, however it's also plausible knowing how groupthink can occur in online circles that it's a 'natural' outcome and the sites take advantage of the engagement and lean into the most vocal biases of the userbase.
The debate behind natural vs manipulated might not be resolvable, as we can draw the line anywhere, is it the users, is it the owners, is it the capitalist powers, is it the ecosystem, all the way back to god.
we do have the Timeline.
Agriculture > Free time > Hedonism > Hedonistic corporations > Corporate leadership > Kings/Dictators (Ceos) > Oligarchal hierarchies disconnected from consequences > Ecological collapse > Extinction Event.
Right now we're in the middle of the man driven Extinction event (60% of wild species died within the last 50 year) . The social media system operated as a capitalist enterprise, is a magnification of the Same hedonistic vanity of all persons.
Tp4 is sick, he is compelled to buy a new router by social media, even though, he knows not what to do with said "SPEEEED", he knows this even before buying the router, but he buys the router anyway, because his broken mind told him to do so. He has resisted upgrading the router for 5 years already, but social media got to him in the end.
This is where we're at as a consumer base. The tech is an accelerator given to minds incapable of grasping the full reach of the consequences.
We could say, it's the acceleration of NORMAL inclinations, but when the normal was already bad/addicted/sick/hobbled/paralyzed, is putting a big lever on such a mind really going turn this around ?
[attachimg=1]
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In case you guys forgot, they feed you what you keep clicking on.
If they gave you a bunch of Trump stuff when you are all about Biden you wouldn't stick around long. This doesn't mean they can't push an agenda but they aren't going to convert anyone not sitting on the fence already, they can only rile them up. Which unfortunately works all too well.
I think you guys give Reddit (the company) a bit too much credit on this, it's far more difficult as a business to control than something like Twitter or Facebook where everything is curated specifically for you to maintain peak engagement. Not saying Reddit doesn't do it or that they haven't gotten worse about it but it doesn't (or at least didn't) use nearly the same amount of user manipulation Facebook has, not by a long shot. If you think it does or has, you don't understand how Facebook operates (and to a lesser extent, Twitter).
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Without social medias, it would be very difficult for all of us!
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Never had a FB, Insta, or Snap. Literally never made an account on any.
A social media virgin, and nowadays I'm glad to be so.
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A social media virgin, and nowadays I'm glad to be so.
Mostly the same here. I got Facebook and Twitter accounts many years ago when they first started but never got involved.
I don't think that I ever made a Tweet and I closed the account when Musk took it over.
Facebook turned me off very quickly with all the right-wing rants (and that was in the pre-Obama era) and I doubt that have more than about a dozen "friends" there - with only perhaps 3-4 of them not related to me by blood or marriage. Really, the only reason I keep the account open is that I have a photographer friend who regularly posts his photos there.
Again, I will recommend this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37830765-ten-arguments-for-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37830765-ten-arguments-for-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now), by one of the original personal computing "pioneers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier), which is several years old now, but it is still quite relevant and on target.
Just keep it to cat pictures and don't try to communicate ideas there.