Small group to talk to family or friends? Great!
The local community? Begin noticing dbags and crazies, people nasty to each other
National or larger? Forget about it, and now it's ratfucked by bad actors, shills, foreign intel, and other ilk.
Moderation also gets worse because these large entities try to create blanket standards with such a wide variation of cultures involved.
Personally, it has made me lose interest in my favorite outdoor activity i.e. hiking because of too many people showing up. Ex: I won't set foot on a trail on weekends[0].
Will you be blaming social media for their overcrowded trains too?
I'm assuming they've witnessed the changes first hand in that case.
Even I complain about my inability to be alone on a trail in CA, or struggling to find campsites, occasionally shaking my fist at social media for it.
But the linked images from India showing extreme overcrowding has far more to do with the population size than social media. When you have that many people, any little force generating focused interest is getting multiplied by a huge number.
You shouldn't deny India is overpopulated when riding a train there resembles a footclub cup match.
What is the definition of over-population? Over what area are you measuring it? Those train images are likely from just one city. There are other places where the trains just run like any other place.
We can split hairs about other places, and obviously lots of places have their population/crowding issues. The planet has a lot of people.
But India is just not useful as a data point for blaming social media for these phenomena because it's such an outlier. Practically anything informing the people of India of something somewhere of interest is going to generate a thundering herd of exceptional proportion. You don't need social media's help.
It’s the same in Ontario Canada, which can be frustrating.
But I am curious what activities are now missing all those people.
It is all perspective and humans will use tools for good and bad. There is plenty of good in the world thanks to social media.
But, of course it created a bunch of good thing. Nothing that spreads that widely has only bad consequences. And yes, I like the good consequences quite a lot too. It's too bad most of the companies keeping those networks are adamant in destroying all the good value and keeping only the bad.
From a utility standpoint, social media seems to have largely filled the same role email used to among distant family.
Really? Well I might be biased but all I see these days is people trying very, very hard to curate the perfect internet image of themselves.
Emphasis mine, as a reminder to be careful with absolutes. It's a bit of a stretch to suggest that nobody has become more self-centered due to social media.
I get why electronic communication is a boon but I am sometimes confused by folks who prefer a public communication medium for their private comms.
This reads like you trying to stand between me and my friends. If you don't like social media that's fine for you, but the rest of us quite like it and that's no business of yours. Butt out.
I always question what intention does someone have painting social media in such broad strokes. Especially when we consider who actively gains from narrowing where information can be accessed.
And the abundant information, is that really a good thing? How much of it is good? Remember the Trump election, the amount of outright lies thrown around and the level of polarization, with even family members unable to speak to each other.
I'm not saying there's nothing good at all between the mud, but on the whole I think it's been a disaster.
Boomers?
Also I'm not sure cancel culture is a bad thing. It's just negative branding for what is essentially the first time marginalized groups could have their voices heard. People who are used to writing op-eds and never hearing any criticism of their ideas are finally getting some negative feedback and they're super mad about it. You get absolutely unreal outrage about that, like this NYT opinion:
> For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
That is the first sentence in the piece. Unreal. There has never been a right to say what you want without being shamed or shunned. Shaming and shunning is part of free speech. Boycotts are part of free speech.
That's how backwards this whole "cancel culture" outrage is. Better to call it accountability culture, or response culture, or feedback culture.
Scott Cawson, the creator of Five Nights at Freddy's, was doxxed, harassed, and had death threats issued against himself and his pregnant wife.
His crime against society? Being outed as a Republican political donor. Not a crime, just exercising his right to participate in democracy. His ability to do so was subsequently attacked and stripped from him by brave keyboard warriors.
Death threats are an actual crime. They are not free speech. Nobody's been held accountable for that though.
This is the problem with modern "equality" movements. They don't want parity at all. They just want to tilt things enough in their favor so they can be the ones doing the bullying.
There are laws about this. If they're difficult to enforce then somebody needs to make a decision about how much anonymity to allow on the internet, and other such difficult subjects. That's kind of the world we live in.
You realize that marginalized people get doxxed and have death threats made against them every single day, often multiple times per day, and nobody seems to hear about it? Because again, they're not famous or notable in any way, they have nobody to call up to write that op-ed or have their signal boosted. It doesn't make the threats to their lives less serious. They can't afford the "private security" that people often say they're getting in order to make their death threats seem more serious.
Are you interested in stopping such death threats in general on the internet? It's doable, but you'd have to make some sacrifices.
Almost like how you have to sacrifice being free from criticism if you really want free speech.
What exactly is your point here? I know what you're getting at but dare not invoke their name. Sure, "marginalized people" getting threatened is a problem. They're not exactly without a platform-- they're perfectly capable of coordinating on Twitter and elsewhere to attack and deplatform anybody that dares oppose them. One of the more contentious ones literally uses the exact term "signal boosting" to issue calls to arms. So they're not exactly powerless either. America's "marginalized people" are apparently more effective than the Ku Klux Klan, since they get to intimidate opposition while masquerading as victims who cannot be challenged, lest they stalk and attack everyone associated with you and cost you your livelihood. We won't kill you, we'll just isolate you from your entire support network to ensure you and your family starve to death. Such magnanimous treatment from the uwu innocent widdle victim peopurrs! Better think twice before you speak out!
This isn't equality, nor is it a matter of free speech or criticism-- advancing a political cause through intimidation, violence and fear is literally the textbook definition of Terrorism. I expect nothing less though; every red flag of fraud has been repurposed by a certain demographic as central to their "identity," so why not normalize terrorism as a means of discourse while we're at it? Biden insists it's inbred gun hoarders we need to be worried about-- because we meet so many of those on a daily basis. Meanwhile, I have to play wordsmith with every fucking character I post online or my wife and children face death/rape threats and I get bricks thrown through my windows. You know, all the fun stuff the KKK used to do to blacks in the 60s. Remember: the people throwing the bricks are the real victims, and don't you dare suggest otherwise or you're next. That's just criticism coming through the window, and nobody deserves protection from that.
Your idea of marginalized people is a lie-- misdirection at best. Anytime white men (always white men) start wearing dresses and seeking political power, they form a child-sex cult, a hate group, or both. I once bought into their bullshit, but there's no fooling me twice.
It's anybody who criticizes anybody. Women journalists in particular, BLM activists, climate change scientists. You realize there's been a wave of scientists who have left Twitter recently?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/14/climate-...
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/08/09/lex-scott-steps-down/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ferguson-d...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/23/blm-activist-s...
I guess you're invoking something about trans people? I mean them too but honestly it's everybody.
That seems like an odd claim to make. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=arrested+for+making+death+threats&...
> There has never been a right to say what you want without being shamed or shunned
So... when the marginalized groups start getting cancelled, do I get to say "well they don't have a right not to be shunned"?
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
We're living in a new McCarthyism.
After all the things that have happened to marginalized groups throughout history, mean tweets are worse?
We're all living by the sword and dying by the sword called free speech. Conservatives are boycotting Bud Light. That's their right.
The backwardness of all of this is that people keep going on cable news and writing op-eds about various subjects and when they get criticized, they call up their friends at the NYT and get their opinion blasted to millions of subscribers complaining about a nobody in the middle of Ohio who called them a jerk on Twitter and got 10k likes.
Is nobody else seeing how this is lopsided?