Good thing is, you don't need to use it. Bad thing is, it affects reality.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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I mean, I feel like just shutting it down would solve at least some problems. Shuttering it all, video sharing platforms included.
Not a situation most anyone would agree on, but it's an idea.
Getting banned from Facebook. After a decade of clapping back against racists. Has been the best thing in my life. So glad to be out of there. Just wish I could have saved my pics first.
Can't?
I'm on Lemmy, am I not?
It CAN be fixed, the question if the will is there. We need to inform and teach more people
Right. We fix ourselves first, we are already here and we do not attempt to control others. We make and go our own way every moment.
Most people don't know about this experience, probably aren't looking for this experience, or would not know how to interact with it. I know it sounds crazy, but Reddit still confuses many people. Lemmy's a different ball of similar wax.
They want the saccharine-coated dopamine-filled mass-produced low-effort meme cesspool that IG, TikTok, etc. all provide. They don't know they want more until they decide they're done with it and start to look. Until then, it's like showing hieroglyphs to an iguana.
But what we find is that it's not just that this content spreads; it also shapes the network structures that are formed. So there's feedback between the effective emotional action of choosing to retweet something and the network structure that emerges. And then in turn, you have a network structure that feeds back what content you see, resulting in a toxic network. The definition of an online social network is that you have this kind of posting, reposting, and following dynamics. It's quite fundamental to it. That alone seems to be enough to drive these negative outcomes.
Trying to grasp it in my own words;
Because social networks are about interactions and networks (follows, communities, topics, instances), they inherently human nature establish toxic networks.
Even when not showing content through engagement-based hot or active metrics, interactions will push towards networking effects of central players/influencers and filter and trigger bubbles.
If there were no voting, no followable accounts or communities, it would not be a social network anymore (by their definition).
Using Bluesky as the non-algorithmic example is problematic - they still need to show high user engagement numbers for their VC owners. Mastodon do not have the same problems since on the contrary a Mastodon instance owner has an economic incentive in making sure spambots and troll factory accounts get closed down asap.
Sounds like it's time to delete it, then.
As long as people worship themselves (but also, paradoxically, require everyone's attention and approval all the time just to make it to the next day), it will continue being that way. For those who see it for what it is and are disgusted by it, we have Lemmy/discussion boards.