Amazon, Google and Microsoft would still be there, so the Internet seems to be suffering from a metastatic cancer at this point. Cutting off two revolting lumps helps, but the prognosis doesn’t look that great.

Social media was a mistake, tbh

Let's just pretend nothing after MySpace ever happened

We're on the solution right now, lmao

Every problem is an opportunity to earn even more money or gain even more power. Bad for average users, great for those who own and control the platform.

Uhm, I seem to recall that social media was actually pretty good in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The authors used AI models as the users. Could it be that their models have internalized the effects of the algorithms that fundamentally changed social media from what it used to be over a decade ago, and then be reproducing those effects in their experiments? Sounds like they're treating models as if they're humans, and they are not. Especially when it comes to changing behaviour based on changes in the environment, which is what they were testing by trying different algorithms and mitigation strategies.

All those platforms work the same way. In the end it's all about the same social dynamics, about control. "We are the alternative to all the shitty peer groups out there! Join us!" is one of the oldest tricks in the playbook. There is no alternative. Because it's all based on human nature.

Seriously, read her books. I looooove „The Dispossessed“

Pre print journalism fucking bugs me because the journalists themselves can't actually judge if anything is worth discussing so they just look for click bait shit.

This methodology to discover what interventions do in human environments seems particularly deranged to me though:

We address this question using a novel
method – generative social simulation – that embeds Large Language Models
within Agent-Based Models to create socially rich synthetic platforms.

LLM agents trained on social media dysfunction recreate it unfailingly. No shit. I understand they gave them personas to adopt as prompts, but prompts cannot and do not override training data. As we've seen multiple times over and over. LLMs fundamentally cannot maintain an identity from a prompt. They are context engines.

Particularly concerning sf the silo claims. LLMs riffing on a theme over extended interactions because the tokens keep coming up that way is expected behavior. LLMs are fundamentally incurious and even more prone to locking into one line of text than humans as the longer conversation reinforces it.

Determining the functionality of what the authors describe as a novel approach might be more warranted than making conclusions on it.

Good thing is, you don't need to use it.
Bad thing is, it affects reality.

The dream was that social media would help revitalize the public sphere and support the kind of constructive political dialogue that your paper deems "vital to democratic life." That largely hasn't happened.

Their idea is basically that people need to be told the same things to what to believe in so that democracy can work as it's supposed to and social media is disrupting that with all the conspiracy shit, flame wars and polarization of opinions. The issue is that this common idea is fermented by the boomer generation. They grew up in really quite anomalous post war world when there was first time in human history basically monolithic mass media that people watched it AND had high trust in AND the system provided more for the masses more than it does now. Those then lead to to high societal inclusion and high social cohesion that again fed into the prosperity. Now we have fragmented information sphere and things are shit are shit, political center is hated by most and radicalism is once again rising.

However so called democracy or collective decision making in general itself does not rely on people not believing in crazy shit, not being fed the best possible validated information, or god forbid having unorthodox ideas of their own or developing factionalism or totally different reading on reality. It helps make it smoother and avoids violence, but that "smoothness of process" that boomers have come to expect is also why society in wider terms is politically stagnant and rotting. People seem to live in different realities, because in a sense we are, because our economic realities can be so different and decoupled form the mainstream narrative. It never didn't have to get this bad, but social media only a venting mechanism not the reason for the growing divides. The division in society and the general anguish is real IRL, it just takes forms of all kinds of irrational and counterproductive forms online. The problem isn't really that people are factional and can't agree with each other, it's that nobody can no longer agree with the monolithic unpopular political center that is holding on to power for dear life.

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

The study is based on having LLMs decide to amplify one of the top ten posts on their timeline or share a news headline. LLMs aren't people, and the authors have not convinced me that they will behave like people in this context.

The behavioral options are restricted to posting news headlines, reposting news headlines, or being passive. There's no option to create original content, and no interventions centered on discouraging reposting. Facebook has experimented with limits to reposting and found such limits discouraged the spread of divisive content and misinformation.

I mostly use social media to share pictures of birds. This contributes to some of the problems the source article discusses. It causes fragmentation; people who don't like bird photos won't follow me. It leads to disparity of influence; I think I have more followers than the average Mastodon account. I sometimes even amplify conflict.

None of those have had much success in creating social networks that suck people in quite like the others

Not to say they don't have their own problems, but the bulk of problems with social media come squarely from meta & twitter.

There will be a big curtaining of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Adobe if Facebook, TikTok and Twitter (and YouTube) have their algorithmic feeds outlawed.

It would probably cause the AI bubble to burst too so our OSs, Applications and Search Engines (and Government) would become usable again.

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.