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.

I’m on Lemmy, am I not?

It CAN be fixed, the question if the will is there.

While and improvement Lemmy is far from perfect. The upvote-downvote sytem of reddit alone encourages group think and self censorship. It doesn't really help that much that we can go circlejerk in some other instance if we get hated on or banned by mods. We are still encouraged to keep in line to keep the bubble intact.

The AlGoRyThMs are what is inducing the social damage.

Even games of chance (like Poker Machines and) would be less destructive if they were fairer and less engaging.

Yeah, this author is the pop-sci / sci-fi media writer on Ars Technica, not one of the actual science coverage ones that stick to their area of expertise, and you can tell by the overly broad, click bait, headline, that is not actually supported by the research at hand.

The actual research is using limited LLM agents and only explores an incredibly limited number of interventions. This research does not remotely come close to supporting the question of whether or not social media can be fixed, which in itself is a different question from harm reduction.

The Left Hand of Darkness is excellent too. Sci-fi from the 1960s about a planet whose people have no fixed sex or gender, and a man from Earth who struggles to understand and function in this society. That description makes it sound very worthy, but it's actually gripping and moving.

Social media will be fixed by - wait for it...

Now.

Done. Fixed it, you may thank me later.

Yours,

B-TR3E - the man who fixed social media

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.

After 20 years of living with it, I've decided I don't like the downvote. The upvote is fine.

Reddit's founders, early on tried to encourage people to treat the downvote as moderation. It was meant to mean that a thing doesn't belong on reddit and people shouldn't see it. Of course that quickly became mere dislike or disagreement.

I'd prefer an approach that requires some input about what's wrong with a post in order to reduce its prominence; a restricted list of options as in Slashdot's moderation would be sufficient, I think. I'm not sure whether this should necessarily require also making a report to a more powerful admin/moderator, but I lean toward making that optional in most communities.

the problem is algorithms. during the whole bluesky promo all over lemmy while everyone was shitting on mastodon. the only thing that's broken is algorithms, and once you throw them out social media is immediately fixed - but of course the primary argument of mastodon vs bluesky was that mastodon requires you to curate your content (like joining a sub on reddit to see it on your front page stream, before algorithms fucked that site, and the thing is people LOVED old reddit so i fail to see how this is bad and doesn't work, but hey, all of lemmy said so, so who am i to blame) whereas bluesky being a relaunch of twitter and literally curating content for you no matter if you actually want to see it or not but for most people reactionary content is the only content they happily interact with anyway so algorithms makes a lot of sense for them because they feel they are engaging more with the site despite the pointless empty engagement they are doing instead of interacting with real users and real content on pages where you have to actively curate your content instead of being fed the lowest hanging fruit.

/ rant off

who will pay our representatives to push this through?

Particularly apt given that many of the biggest problems with social media are problems of capitalism. Social media platforms have found it most profitable to monetize conflict and division, the low self-esteem of teenagers, lies and misinformation, envy over the curated simulacrum of a life presented by a parasocial figure.

These things drive engagement. Engagement drives clicks. Clicks drive ad revenue. Revenue pleases shareholders. And all that feeds back into a system that trades negativity in the real world for positivity on a balance sheet.

Of course -corporate- social media can't be fixed ... it already works exactly they way they want it to...

This is spot on. The issue with any system is that people don’t pay attention to the incentives.

When a surgeon earns more if he does more surgeries with no downside, most surgeons in that system will obviously push for surgeries that aren’t necessary. How to balance incentives should be the main focus on any system that we’re part of.

You can pretty much understand someone else’s behavior by looking at what they’re gaining or what problem they’re avoiding by doing what they’re doing.

LeGuin is a treasure.

Exactly, the one big issue with the modern world is the algorithms pushing for engagement as the only important metric.

Reddit certainly had its problems but was actually pretty good for the ~15 years before it started getting enshittified more and more to try to extract value.

Facebook was pretty boring before they tried to make money. Still ick, but mostly just people posting pictures of activities with family or friends.

I’d prefer an approach that requires some input about what’s wrong with a post in order to reduce its prominence

A lot of the time, I downvote troll content that should not be engaged with. Like, not technically against the rules, but definitely someone who is not posting in good faith. If I responded to the post, I'd be contributing to the problem.

I don't mean replying, but selecting from a menu of possible reasons to downrank a post. Slashdot's moderation system that I mentioned earlier has (or had - haven't looked there in a while) "troll" as one of the categories.

I think just going back to internet forums circa early 2000s is probably a better way to engage honestly. They're still around, just not as "smartphone friendly" and doomscroll-enabled, due to the format.

I'm talking stuff like SomethingAwful, GaiaOnline, Fark, Newgrounds forum, GlockTalk, Slashdot, vBulletin etc.

These types of forums allowed you to discuss timely issues and news if you wanted. You could go a thousand miles deep on some bizarre subculture or stick to general discussion. They also had protomeme culture before that was a thing - aka "embedded image macros".