What Went Wrong with Social Media?
https://medium.com/@arunbains09/what-went-wrong-with-social-media-1955d7b9dfd0
What Went Wrong with Social Media?
https://medium.com/@arunbains09/what-went-wrong-with-social-media-1955d7b9dfd0
25 Comments
If social media has already had this much of an influence on who we are and how we act, it is quite frightening to think about what the future may look like. And I don’t see either of the developments the author talked about changing. If anything, they will just get worse. Short-form content seems like a feedback loop – we watch short form, we fry our attention spans, we seek out more short form…
A future where short form is the only form would be very dangerous.
Really interesting to think about… social media has us in a vicious echo chamber, one that will only get worse and worse in the future
Almost certainly has more to do with the algorithms being designed to drive up engagement regardless of how vitriolic it is. Because they’ve shown they absolutely can tamp down on hate speech if they want.
Social media was never going to last, it’s not profitable to host someone’s baby pictures and let people chat for free. Money was always going to ruin social media. They needed to turn a free service into a profit machine. That requires something to be sold, and a social media platform doesn’t produce anything, so they only thing they can sell, is you.
If you’re going to repost this image from 9 days ago then I’m going to repost my comment from the same thread:
> People. People are the problem with social media. We inevitably end up putting ourselves in echo chambers and thrive on gossip and trash talking the “others”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1mvmf16/comment/n9r5wkp/?context=3
They let non-geeks onto the internet in 1993 and it’s been downhill ever since.
Advertising, once it became a place for paid advertising the rot started. Saying this as someone that has worked in marketing including digital for various companies since 2010.
Humans……they just like to cause shit or stir shit.
In a way, this article is just saying that this digital age is just giving us mental obesity. By feeding us a constant stream of unhealthy content for profit. Stymying us emotionally, intellectually, and ideologically. Like a constant diet of fried food and drive-through snacks, we have become addicted and developed diseases. There needs to be a community consensus for a cultural turnaround. So profits and data cannot be garnered from engagement, or we lose what little diversity of information the internet can offer us.
What went wrong was unvetted “opinions” from stupid people appearing to have the same weight as actual experts and a lack of education on how to discern between the two.
Not to be glib, but capitalism, and corporatism.
Initially the internet was just people making fun things expressing themselves and communicating, over time everything got gobbled up, locked down, structured by algorithms to increase engagement to continuously ad feed, and this pure money focus has driven everyone a bit crazy, and driven US into a looking new dark age of lies, hatred and fear… but some people got reallllly rich off of it.
Every good new thung ends up getting choked and warped by capital over time, until it dies and the ghouls move on to new hosts.
Could be COVID side effects that’s the other thing that happened.
It became more of a tool used for business and politics rather than socializing with other people.
This comedy sketch explains it better than any article I’ve read.
https://youtu.be/x1aZEz8BQiU?si=i5AJ03ccfD043sVM
Q: What went wrong with Social Media?
A: Capitalism.
The companies that built the platforms became aware that humans respond to certain stimulus like moths to a flame.
They used that knowledge to “engage” users so they could be exposed to more and more paid advertising.
From there… Zero checks and balances.
Likes, shares and subscribes eclipsed logic and education and reason.
Nothing went wrong with social media….unless you are Israel. Then social media is going to be your worst enemy. The numbers are pretty telling. Todays youth is abandoning all of the old media. Which means that it is harder and harder to propagandize. The constant barrage of marketing that the world has been told for the past 8 decades. All to conflate the idea that the victims of 30’s Germany could not in fact become the villians that created an Apartheid state, complete with genocide, death camps and concentration camps of their own.
The fact that todays next generation is both harder to propagandize the message that they are perpetual victims and blameless for the part in their crimes against humanity and with the widespread of social media todays generation can actually spread that message to their peers.
So to answer OP’s question..nothing went wrong.
Social media development was spearheaded by a group of shockingly manipulative sociopaths and true psychopaths, just to exploit and make money off deliberately creating maximum divisions, hatred, and misery among people using the social media platforms, so those people stayed engaged on the social media platforms for longer, in order to enable more exposure to advertising revenue, which makes the shockingly manipulative sociopaths and true psychopaths more money.
It’s social media’s loop of evil revenue generation.
Social media turned most people into failed narcissists
Money. It ruins everything that should be free or cheap on a long enough timeline.
CAPITALISM MAN.
It’s ALWAYS capitalism.
Capitalism is what turns beautiful technologies into shit.
No new technologies are going to save us from the ever corrupting grip of a system designed to exploit.
The first sentence was already complete shit.
“Lets start with the facts: [lists a bunch of negative traits about young people that are definitely not in any way facts]”
Absolutely zero reason to read beyond that.
Case in point (me): we’re tired of hearing from people we don’t care about.
Humans … inherently behind the keyboard people are not acting like how they act in real life :..
Humans got involved is what went wrong. Everything social will always be tainted by a minority with psychosis which will set the bar so low, entire platforms succumb and go under or start to reflect that psychosis directly back into the users minds. Algorithms based on the user behaviour will also accelerate and reflect the same psychosis. Perhaps in future they will be outlawed, but more likely they will remain as totalitarian control tools.