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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

What makes social media unhealthy is a the fact the whole thing is a giant marketing exercise. Every company and every individual has their own brands to maintain. Even sites like Reddit have a brand and image to maintain.. with the right memes (whether political talking points or dank images).

Decentralizing has nothing at all to do with these core issues.

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I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.

I hate Facebook and Twitter as much as the next person, but maybe humans haven't evolved to be able to instantly reach an audience of thousands or millions without any personal or social risk. People have been dangerous and inhuman for many years in the past on a grand scale, but now every human can exist on a grand scale, and maybe the results of that alone are often unsavory.

One direction we could go in to deepen this conversation is to bring in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction. It potentially explains some of why mass social media communication is so problematic.

Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

> I wonder if a large part of what makes social media unhealthy is exposing human nature to mass communication.

Bingo. I do not believe for a moment that social media company A or B is worsening society. Heck, Facebook links your presumably real identity to your content and people are still disgusting online.

No company will win by not rewarding “interesting content”. We tried that, it was called forums, and they lost out to more “rewarding” communities.

I don't think communities having brands is marketing. That's just community groups: communities have in-jokes, memes, vulnerability, sharing, cultures. HN links to that one dropbox comment. That isn't dropbox marketing or whatever that's just a self-effacing ingroup joke, only tangentially about the company.

Marketing might hijack these groups to sell things, but I don't think just the act of memeing to be marketing or selling anything.

Yes. It's why there's so many people who wanted to quit Twitter recently, but couldn't. They went and tried Mastodon/Hive/etc, but couldn't adjust to having less followers out of the gate. Their brand exists on places like Twitter. In some cases they need it to make money. But even for users with smaller followings, it's where their largest engagements are. And too many people don't want to give that up and start over. The venue for their current brand has to seize to exist before they'll move.

Funny that you mention engagement. I've been witnessing many people in the fedi who say they have much less followers now but the engagement has been so much better than in Twitter since many years.

And the comments have been good and constructive...

It's exactly like that.

Similar to how a post here on HN can have five comments, and the same post on Reddit five hundred. Four hundred trying to make funny quips, ninety trolling, and the rest hidden in the noise. Yet on HN at least three offer real insights, ask good questions etc.

Threads and conversations on the fediverse, currently, are just so much more engaging, positive, insigtfull than on Twitter, it's bonkers. But also in sheer numbers. The same post on twitter gets far less engagement than on fediverse: measured entirely unscientific, but visible nonetheless.

I've seen a lot of that too. But good luck convincing people still on Twitter. They're too attached to their brand existing there.

> What makes social media unhealthy is a the fact the whole thing is a giant marketing exercise.

No. That's not the problem.

Remove all ads from Twitter or Facebook, bestow a quadrillion-dollar endowment on them, and they'll still turn into shitty, toxic cesspits, because of the way the algorithms bring different people together... In a way that tends to maximize anger.

Now, it's true that 'maximizing engagement' was the reason that those algorithms were built the way they were, but that's only tangential to chasing ad revenue. As long as there's work being done on growing the network, regardless of the reason, the temptation to build it out in that toxic manner will be present.

I'm going to have to disagree here.

Remember how they started out without "algorithms", only a time-ordered feed ?

A completely opposite counter-example : fitness memberships don't care about your "engagement", only that your keep paying your monthly subscription.

The paid ads on Twitter and Facebook are hardly the only marketing efforts you see on those sites. In fact I’d say most of the marketing we’re exposed to on Twitter and Facebook isn’t via “ads”.

Guerilla marketing and propaganda is annoying, but hardly the worst aspect of those sites.

My friend in the sales dep always says “everything is sales”. Someone is selling to you and/or you are selling to them deliberately or not.

Probably a cynical view of the world but I just remembered it while reading your comment.

100% agreed. Toxicity of social media comes from the "look at me!" and "I'm implicitly better than you" mentality. Most people have egos, which is fine and necessary, but social media gives free reign to let those with huge egos use their looks or material goods for attention seeking and any criticism is blocked or met with "haters gonna hate.

Seems like Mozilla is just hopping onto the decentralization/Mastodon bandwagon; where was Mozilla when Mastodon was a fledging new company?

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/official-mozilla-presence-on...

And never we forget that Mozilla talked about integrating moderations into their own browser...

While attention-seeking and "influencers" are problematic, I agree, when I look at how toxic political discussions have become, particularly in America, I don't see attention-seeking as the problem here. Instead, it's a clash of ideologies, compounded by people's ideologies becoming warped by exposure to others (people becoming "radicalized").

I think it's a mix of both clash of ideologies, and attempts to outdoor the other with snarky responses. Throughout history political ideology has had strong opinions from opposing sides, but typical only a subset of people were given an opportunity to voice them. Now, anyone can and a lot of it does seem to be pure snark.

Most start off as a pretty positive experience, which is what makes them so popular! But once they've got that network effect going, people become disinclined to leave, even as the platforms try to monetize and in the process turn into finely-tuned human manipulation platforms.

If a platform like WT Social could gain traction it might work as a sustainable alternative because it lacks that desperate drive to squeeze cash out of people's brains. Currently I'm really enjoying BeReal, but I know it's a matter of time until their fun and playful mechanics turn dark.

Companies are different from individuals.

Yeah, I tried Mastodon just yesterday and one of the first toots or whatever that I saw was someone trying to hawk a book they had written.

Good for them. If they wrote a book they should absolutely be talking about it.

If you don't like it, don't follow them.

I don't know the book of which you speak, but promoting your work as an individual or even an independent business is different from, for example a company like Doritos advertising their chips. I think the difference is apparent but I'm happy to elaborate if it isn't.

good for them.

Ok so we can go one step further, which is that most speech is a giant marketing exercise. Some people use it to great effect, others less so. And the ones that do get a multiplier effect from putting that speech on the internet/social media, so the increased reach.

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