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Comment by axegon_ | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of people who generally feel the same way and stay away from social media in general(myself included). Which is incredibly odd when you are building things that are aimed at those exact people. A case of "don't use your own supply" I suppose.

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The more involved you are with anything to do with data, the less likely you are to use it.

I don't like social media very much because it's created a culture of bullying people into conformity. It's not so much my opinion that data trends predict individuals, as some may argue, but that people are pressured to conform to trends, rewarded when they do, and punished when they do not. This philosophy is deeply entrenched in the language and behaviors of groups, and it's violently prone to manipulation.

Social media didn't create the culture. It just gave more people a chance to be part of it. Before, marginalized voices were almost universally bullied and abused into conformity. Some of those marginalized people handle having a voice now poorly, but it doesn't mean the culture they participate in is new.

I would agree but that argument goes for pretty much any aspect of human behavior. Where I make a distinction is by defining dominant behavior.

Before social media, the bullying was typically confined to school yards. Now, it follows the bullied everywhere they go. Social Media didn't create the culture, but it poured fuel on the fire and cranked the volume knob up to 11.

I partially disagree. Verbal communication requires people to do at least some degree of thinking if they want to respond to a view that they disagree with. Whereas social media allows people to "participate" in a discussion (in the sense that they produce feedback which influences the course of the discussion) using a mode of thought that can be summarized as "does this make me feel like pressing the upvote or the downvote button?"

I believe that this latter mode of participant-community interaction is especially conducive to echo chambers, because it reduces any kind of content to a one-dimensional axis: does the community like this, or does the community dislike this?

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