I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
It remains insane to me that it’s so hard for so many to just, not use them. Truly, your life is not being enriched by twitter or Facebook. You can delete your account and I promise you won’t find yourself missing them.
Living rurally, the main thing I hear is “but marketplace”. It’s a pretty crucial way of getting cheap goods.
Honestly Marketplace is the best argument for FB today. How it has usurped Craigslist I don’t understand, maybe because it’s easier to navigate, but you’re right that it is the defacto modern market.
I don’t use it so I forget about it, but this is a good counterpoint.
I believe a major reason is reputation tied to a person’s account. OfferUp has also superceded Craigslist in my area and I think the user history and reputation system plays a role there. Same with other stuff like eBay, Mercari, StockX. Craigslist is too anonymous
it’s so hard for so many to just, not use them
Networking Effect is a bitch. It’s like telling someone to stop using AT&T or United Airlines. These are the major arteries of communication for billions of people. Individuals can’t abstain from using them without isolating themselves.
You can delete your account and I promise you won’t find yourself missing them.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t have their entire extended family posting and chatting on the sites regularly. I get calls from extended family, asking me to weigh in on long conversations and exchanges and posting sprees. And then when I respond on the phone, I get a “No, you have to post it, I’m not going to just repeat it to everyone for you”.
Tons of social pressure to just go where everyone else is.
The problem is addiction. Same as any other drug. It’s no coincidence that Facebook and X were rolled out as free services, with free accounts, where you can interact with anyone for free.
Before the digital drug dealers running each changed that deal. Needing money, running ads, and restricting what you can do that all used to be free.
These companies got us addicted to using tech in place of human socialization and then monitized that addiction.
People can’t leave because for some it’s the only human contact they have. Even if it’s artificial, they still want it to the point of it hurting themselves. Just like any other addiction.
edit: misunderstood comment, thought it was replying to a later comment in the thread, sorry
Ditto reddit. I thought it would be this huge loss. It’s the opposite.
Even without lemmy, there’s so much more to the internet than these threads under a link aggregator.
I’m not that surprised that people can’t quit Instagram, to be honest. I still miss the posts of some of the artists I like. Some of them really put me in a good mood. I can’t for the life of me understand why they don’t take 2 minutes a day to at least copy-paste their Insta posts to Pixelfed or literally anything in the fediverse. Hell, at least Bluesky. I’m not even talking about huge arena-filling bands that have someone handle their socials. I’m talking about indie bands that would genuinely benefit from small community building and would probably be embraced around here for going against the flow.
A lot of them don’t know about or don’t understand the fediverse. We need to be more proactive in asking this of the artists we love. I’ll try to be better about doing my part to mention the fediverse to artists in my sphere, an especially good fit given the DIY roots of the punk/hardcore lineage of much of it.
and don’t be pushy and annoying about it. just ask if they’re on mastodon. if they’re not just say “ah bummer” and mov on
Tbh I think you can one time drop a very friendly but more direct: “hey have you guys thought about posting your stuff in a music community on Lemmy? It’s like reddit but smaller and with a very engaged audience. I think they’d dig you there!” Or something to that effect. Just don’t be a dick about it or spam them.
exactly. make the artist feel like there’s an audience to be reached, not like the only point is ideological purity
I don’t think you’ll find that the case. Most people have a problem. They are incapable of being even slightly bored.
If you take away twittler and Facebook, they’ll readily replace them with BlueSky, YouTube and TikTok because they’re easy and low effort.
It’s harder to read a book, do a craft, go for a walk, or anything truly enriching.
My wife tried to exit TT when things got political. She lasted 2 weeks before she made a new non-political following account and went right back at it.
I left Facebook quite some time ago, but have to go back regularly for my HOA bs. I still peek in on my old friendships while i’m there, but don’t engage and make sure to leave quickly.
Tbh, I know this will be a hot take, but I do think Tiktok is a vastly better network. Tumblr too. These are still actual social media platforms.
Yes, they’re deeply algorithm-based, yes they’re for-profit, capitalist networks still, but I think they are miles better than FB/Insta or Twitter/X. Have you looked at somebody’s Facebook? 90%+ of posts are corporate, political, special interest. Almost nobody actually posts anything, they just reshare an endless stream of garbage content entirely divorced from the human experience.
At least Tiktok, despite its many legitimate problems and criticisms, is still largely a human-driven platform. It’s still a place where people are making, sharing, and consuming real human posts in the interest of connection.
Tiktok is still social media. I genuinely don’t think FB or X have been social media in many many years.
With you on Tumblr
TT is scarier now that it’s ‘controlled’. in 1984 concepts, I expect they’ll be sending agents to take care of people that are anti-rightwing.
Absolutely, TT is scary and the take-over has been insanely obvious. Despite this people are still regularly making real content and connections on TT. Tiktok, the company and app themselves, are vile and disgusting, but Tiktok, the community, is still largely very decent, imo.
I deleted my facebook in 2019 and havent been contacted by my friends since, that is, people i had known for a decade, before we were allnusing facebook
but i am maybe better off
Close, its never (or rarely) about cutting out bad habits.
Its about filling your life up with good habits.
Now go get a magic wand for your household. Edit: sharing is caring.
Got a magic wand and can confirm, I spend a lot less time on my phone.
Thanks, Hitachi!
Calling BraveLittleHitatchiWand!
What’s frustrating about this “Your consumer habits are wrong, you should make them better” is that Twitter was (ostensibly) the space for the liberal intelligencia to go for journalism and debate and organizing until Elon Musk bought it.
Does anything stop a billionaire from buying up or shutting down the next social media platform? We can wax poetic about Lemmy/Mastadon as a decentralized and indie-operated environment. But crazy to think Joe Biden/Donald Trump can squash TikTok with a few swipes of the pen, that Feds can play wack-a-mole with ZArchive and Anna’s Archive and Wikileaks, etc, while insisting the main hosts for the most popular indie media sites are bulletproof.
Might as well tell people to stop using the internet entirely.
Ill defer to you.
Except lemme, ive had no social media for…3 years now.
In that time, ive taken up muay thai, gratitude practices, doestevesky, made more rl friends and started a new business.
From what little ive read, X/Twitter has never been for debate…but instead existed as a warzone.
Thoughts?
To me twitter started off as like how the facebook timeline used to be, people posted inane stuff about their day. The place for people to overshare. It was the evolution of early 2000s personal blogs now told in a daily stream of single sentence posts.
Then it became celebrity gossip and it continued to be that until celebrities got on and it became the text version of Instagram. As in it was a major advertising portal. Then the scammers/wellness/influencers came in (just like Instagram) and it became where people tried to get people on financial multi level marketing schemes and special pink salt that removes negative ions from your surroundings (that’s still advertising). Around that time Trump was a hot take artist on Twitter and managed to parlay that to the White House (he really worked the media well in 2015/2016 - Twitter was the ultimate guerilla advertising platform then). To that event, whatever good discourse was going on on Twitter was deep in obscurity by like 2012. It had been a culture warzone well before Musk bought it
Everything becoming a punchline, I associate that with twitter. Like no delays joking about sex trafficking and Diddy became a joke day one of his arrest. Joking like that became mainstream on twitter a long time ago
In that time, ive taken up muay thai, gratitude practices, doestevesky, and started a new business.
I mean, congratulations, I guess. I’m in Houston, so all of that just sounds like a ton of driving.
From what little ive read, X/Twitter has never been for debate…but instead existed as a warzone.
I’ve yet to hear of any bridges getting blown up because of a Tweet
I love you, let’s run away together.
💋
I’m doing my part!
I never used Twitter in the first place, so I guess I’m not in the “addicted” category, but I did have an account, in November of 2024 I did actively cancel that X account. Google pushes me X links in my “news feed” I consistently tell Google “No more stories from ____ on X” (they won’t let you block all of X, I wonder why…)
Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away? I was on BlueSky for about 3-4 months, got a little invested/addicted to the platform and took a hard look at what value I was getting from it - on balance: negative. Cold turkey, do I miss it? No.
Facebook holds a (solitary) users group I occasionally want to talk with captive, they acknowledge it’s a terrible platform but they’re too lazy to leave, so I log in when I need to talk with them and that’s it. Anybody “in there” I care about? Long distance phone calls are free these days, e-mail works, why should I be sharing stuff with people I don’t know just to communicate with people I do know?
The average American feels an unmet need for connection. Social media immediately fills that need, exactly like a drug. For a few minutes anyway. You don’t get the benefits of a real connection, just the dopamine. Pretty soon you feel worse, and the best way to stop feeling bad is to hit refresh or keep scrolling. I’m glad we’re finally looking at the consequences of social media for kids, then we can look at what it does to adults.
Social media immediately fills that need, exactly like a drug.
In the late 1980s crack cocaine swept into Miami at bargain prices - but “real” cocaine was already all over the place… show some refinement/self-respect people, don’t smoke the crack. In terms of social media, maybe actually socialize instead of “smoking the crack” of Facebook? Yeah, Facebook is cheaper than meeting people for an activity (any activity) - but get your fat ass up and do something real, it’s better for you.
Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away?
I read recently that “will power” doesn’t meaningfully exist, but it’s rather the result of many other factors. That said, many people seem to be bankrupt of what one would call willpower. I don’t know why.
Maybe it’s the capitalist hell scape. Maybe it’s the plastic in our bodies. Maybe people are just largely social followers, and with a large enough contingent of idiots many people who would behave better follow down into the slop.
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” - when people are busy and focused, it’s a lot easier for (most of) them to avoid ‘bad choices.’ This ranges everywhere from harmful recreational drug use to overeating, even to highly addictive behaviors like smoking - yeah, people take “smoke breaks” at work, but if they’re not at work / engaged with something most tend to smoke much more…
Thing is, you don’t have to be slaving away at a subsistence level wage job that you need for food and shelter in order to avoid bad choices, although the U.S. Puritanical culture seems to think that “those people” who are poor by circumstance must be saved from themselves by such a system.
There are so many factors involved that generalities barely paint any kind of accurate picture of any one individual. Statistically you can say that X% have “addictive personality” and Y% are “genetically pre-disposed” and so on, but it really is different for everyone. Some people get “addicted to sex with strangers” others avoid that trap through paralyzing fear of diseases… Some kick the nicotine habit based on early presentation ill health effects of smoking, some who experience even worse health effects don’t. Obesity sneaks up on you, oh - I’m just 5 points heavier than I would like to be, or 15, or 50 - don’t bother me! I love food.
Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away?
Respectfully, walk away from Google.
walk away from Google.
I can quit, any time I want to… (yeah, they’ve got their hooks deep). But, you’ve gotta carry a phone - right?
Degoogled android with Lineage OS
How much pain is that? You gonna make your wife use Lineage OS too? Let me know how that goes.
My wife and I are smooth sailing on Graphene for almost 6 months now and she’s not as techy
My wife has Linux on her PC, and now she bitches less than she did with Windows, but it’s always a problem still.
Phones are also always a problem, but at least with Android I can point and say: “the rest of the world puts up with this, or worse: that iOS that can’t even map you to a place by its name…”
Its got its quirks but over all its actually pretty great! I did my girlfriend and I’s phones at the same time since we have the same Motorola model. She’s been having a good time with it so far, we both like it because Lineage feels like android from like 10 years ago.
I helped SO move to Linux on their PCS. They dont touch windows except for work,and they’re happy .our media center PC runs Linux and they’re adept at navigating it, even doing some light terminal commands! And they are not super techy
Ive been getting them into f droid and removing garbage spyware apps on their s23. For now.
We are both getting pixels with graphene in the near future.
If you show them how good it is, many people are receptive. Just dont get too technical with it for them.
I have! I only keep my gmail open for work otherwise my phone is completely degoogled
Same. I dropped FB and Twitter several years ago. It helped that I’m old and never kept in touch with family through FB to begin with. Also, I don’t buy crap I don’t need, so I never used their marketplace.
There are alternatives, but as long as FB doesn’t remove features that people use, they won’t leave. They can’t see that they’re being abused, just like every other abusive relationship.
Have u ever bought a used car? Market place is kind of the only way to go, nevermind if you want to sell stuff. I REALLY miss craigslist.
Yeah. I only use fb for market place. Fb knows this, and its getting insanely enshittified every day now. I give it a year before you have to pay to use it.
Funny… the one thing I still use Facebook for is getting rid of crap I don’t need - my neighborhood Buy Nothing group is there, though I wish it weren’t.
Watch the video, they have a great discussion. Jon Stewart seems to think Reddit is great now and Cindy Cohn fights back a little.
In Jon’s defense, Reddit was fairly good and useful (unlike Twitter or FB) at one point many years ago. If you’re not active there it would be easy to think things are still good.
True true. I guess on the surface you’re not being screamed at anymore, that’s a plus. I also think that people are being shown different things.
Yeah, he seems to think that the over-moderation is a good thing, and Cindy tries to convince him that censorship is bad and the answer instead is more like what you can do with the Fediverse, you can move servers if you don’t like how the server is moderated and who they federate with, but people are free to say what they want in their servers.
I’m doing my part.
I’ve always done my part. Never understood twitter in the first place!
Same here, never liked it much
I tried to use it once to have status messages sent from my servers and got banned
good luck, this is like trying to convince a heroin addict to quit because it’s bad for them…
social media algorithms are too good, they are too enticing. They have turned distraction into a multi-trillion dollar industry, and they are impacting every single one of our lives whether we are even on the platform or not
Problem is discipline. Reach for a book instead of doom scrolling. Get something done on the house instead of reading X shitposts. The way most people use phones is a sick addiction that needs treatment, and nobody intervenes. I mean people can’t look in front of their 2 ton steel cage while they hum down the road at 80mph without checking if some random twat added to their snap story lol.
You and I are the same. Ive been replacing phone distraction crap with better things like books and crafts. Or my GBC, lol
The human brain can’t handle all the shit in our devices. They’re detrimental to learning.
I recall a book where people were mandated to have an ear piece that shrieks every 6 seconds, to make sure no one ever has any deep thoughts, to keep them dumb and compliant. Guess what our phone notifications are doing? Its probably the worst thing humans have done in the long term.
That would be the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
Thank you I had forgot the title
Insane how much literature from over 50 years ago had so much foresight. Just started 1981 and it is eerie to say the least!
Isnt it crazy? I know its been memed to death but reading 1984 is like HoooLlly shit how does no one see this and why is it not being stopped. Similar with reading grapes of wrath.
I literally started reading 1984 because of the memes and constant references to it last few years lol. Have not heart of grapes of wrath will have to check that one out next! Thanks for the book recccomendation!
Oh its a classic. Needs to be read by everyone IMO. Also, east of eden .
Good quote that has been true for hundred years:
I’m trying 🤞 I came to the realization a couple years ago that I was in my phone too much. Memory not what it was, focus lost. It’s an uphill battle but I have been getting further away from it every day. Focus, like reading, takes practice. A lot of people out there are “self diagnosing” ADHD these days because they can’t do anything without watching reels while doing it and their focus is lost. Not trying to demean any mental health issues, just know the phone thing will lead to mental problems! If you smoke crack every day you WILL get addicted and it will impact your health. Phone is no different, nobody is immune no matter how strong willed you think you are.
I do those things… and social media/phone users tell me I’m an asshole for not being addicted to my phone.
It’s socially isolating for a lot of people if they aren’t doing what everyone else is doing and aren’t following social media trends that most people are freaking out about.
I’ve had to socially isolate myself a lot more the last few years because it’s so intensely pervasive. Like I meet people, they ask me what my social media handle is, and they get ANGRY when I say I don’t use it. And even ANGRIER when they ask me what I spend all my time doing and I say I read paper books, watch films from the library, etc. and they tell me that makes me anti social and a pretentious douchebag.
That’s rough man. Wise woman once told me tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are, probably just as well to loose some of that crowd. Probably the same folk that before phones would be regulars at the same bar 7 days a week, and only befriended bar mates.
Yeah, they tend to be heavy drinkers and can’t socialize without alcohol. They just get drunk at home and doom scroll and group chat now.
If everyone is addicted but you would you think that’s their problem or is it now your problem, too?
It is when it warps the behavior of everyone else around you, and everything in charge of your life.
And I’m not just talking about the lost attention. The algorithms are not neutral.
The issue affects us all, even if you are not a phone addict!
She was a great guest - and it was really cool to hear the “mastadonverse” shoutout haha.
While not 100% her final point, one of the greatest disappointments of the Internet has been watching rot and crumble into just 5 websites, each just posting screenshots/videos from the other four.
Give them a few more years and every site except big social media will be flagged as dangerous in your browser, like those without valid SSL certs are now.
Pushing SSL was probably the last big tech effort/push that actually benefited users. Sure it made self hosting a little harder, and probably consolidated some tracking behind bigger players, but overall end users did benefit.
Most of what I see now is purely for their benefit and users don’t benefit.
Yeah, rallying against SSL is a weird way to go about it. SSL is one of the biggest and most meaningful changes to come about as a result of the Snowden leaks. The leaks were literally what prompted http to shift towards https instead, because it shined a bright spotlight on how insecure http truly is.
In the short term, it made self-hosting more difficult. But nowadays, with things like nginx and Let’s Encrypt, enabling SSL on your self-hosted site is as simple as selecting a few drop-down boxes, pasting an API key, and automating a cert refresh.
The true “has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet” existential threat is when a company like Meta or Google becomes the authority for things like ID verification or SSO.
“has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet”
Add Cloudflare hosting everything to that list.
A big man in the middle attack service, operating in a hostile nation? What could go wrong?
Cloudflare hosting everything
But it’s so cheeeeeep! My website (continuously hosted since 1996) used to cost me $15 per month, since I migrated it to Cloudfare they’re charging $0.01 ro $0.02 per month for the same hosting services - it’s been about 18 months now, I think - I just got last months “bill” - I now owe them $0.25, but they won’t charge me until it hits $1.00.
Free service? YOU are the product.
I’m not rallying against SSL. Just an example of browser warnings.
Wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
We’re well on our way to being something in between North Korea and Russia. Maybe Hungary would be a good comparison.
Then she says Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm while he defends the openness of Reddit.
These are the experts…
Yeah it’s just follow the money, if a giant corporate entity owns it, it’s going to fuck you and leave you for dead without flinching. It’s really that simple, whether its mcdonalds verizon google geico paramount or any of the other large companies, youre a number on a spreadsheet and if you die they don’t even notice and they will sell you dogshit and leave a smiley face on the receipt. If you owe anything they send your account to collections and minimum wage workers will tell your family they have to pay the debts you left behind.
Fuck reddit Fuck spez
🤦
We’ve been fucking trying for what? Nearly twenty years?!
The value of social media lies is in it’s ability to change thoughts, opinions, and long-term behavior. The public underestimates how effective this technology is, especially when it comes to children. In the absence of regulations, these platforms can make people believe just about anything by exploiting perceived peer pressure.
They’ve both been irrelevant to me for years now.
Since this is Lemmy, I can’t tell if you’re talking Meta/X or EFF and Jon…
All of them lol, i used to watch jon stewart every night during the bush years but now under trump it’s just i dont need to hear it anymore been the same story since i was a little kid and now it’s less funny than ever how much worse trump is than even bush was
Yeah, I hear ya. I can’t watch Jon, Colbert, or any comedian really because it’s all too depressing. Before, you had this naive assumption that it’ll get fixed eventually. The “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, blah blah blah. I don’t know if Dr King knew just how long he was talking about.
Facebook and Twitter, it whatever they call themselves now that they’re having a midlife crisis.
Instead of a convertible, we get a lame attempt at a metaverse and VR goggles?
Worst stepdads ever.
There was a similar post recently about Cambridge leaving twitter, and it got me thinking that universities are really the ideal organizations to host lemmy servers. They have a vested interest in truth and community building. They have a decent enough sense of free speech to stay federated with most other instances. They have pre-existing communities on topic ranging from clubs to technical subjects. Users can confirm their identities by association with the universities, which will keep things civil. Obviously I don’t think they should be the only instances - anonymity has it’s place and value - but I really think universities should be hosting instances.
Im surprised there aren’t student clubs or something hosting instances now that you mention it. That would be a great student project for any CS or even journalism schools.
Right! Plus, it’d be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!
Depends on the university. Some of them are still like that, some of them are totally ideologically captured such that they have encoded being anti-free speech into their conduct codes, and/or they simple would not want to deal with the fallout of bad actors would/could do to their servers.
A lot of university’s slide towards authoritarian centralizing of power post COVID along with internalizing their student bodies. Sadly. They themselves aren’t the bastions of freedom and truth they once were, because those things don’t make the bottom line go up. Many also closed off spaces and programs that were previous open to the public to further isolate themselves from the rest of the world. MIT had libraries and other facilities anyone could use, and now they shut them all off from public access post COVID.
I think Jon Stewart and John Oliver should promote socialism without even saying socialism. Seriously!
People still use them? Why?
probably sunk cost (time invested, followers gained, networking) + real addiction (meta and x will try to trigger any emotion from you so you are invested in the platform) + accessibility (free or cheap access on mobile data with big providers)
Marketplace killed Craigslist because they’re actually halfway decent at detecting and removing scams. Basically the only redeeming feature
Craigslist is still limping along, it’s a smaller group of buyers but still has traction in some markets.
If we had proper anti-trust laws, Marketplace would have been a separate entity that could survive on its own, while the rest dies.
