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.

LeGuin is a treasure.

No social media was created to manipulate people. (Most) social media is a business, optimised to make money. You make money by showing people ads. You can show more ads to people if they stay on the platform longer. You can make people stay longer by engaging them emotionally. End of conspiracy...

But it's not possible to get unbiased content on the internet. Everything exists with an agenda behind it, for the sole reason that hosting anything is going to constantly cost money.

This wasn't a huge deal when individuals were paying to host and share content to a small audience, it was a small amount of money and you could see their motives clearly (a forum for a hobby, a passion project, an online store, etc...).

Social media is different because it presents itself as a public forum where anything can be shared and hosted (for free) to as many people as you want. But they're still footing a very large bill and the wide net of content makes their motives completely opaque. Nobody cares that much about the headaches of maintaining a free and open public forum, and any profit motive is just another way to sell manipulation.

But that's not profitable.

rational discourse is one of the valuable options possible.

Yeah, can't say that I've seen a lot of that on social media.

You don't need social media to do rational discourse, anyway. All you need is two-way communication, a problem that the Internet solved long before any Facebooks or Twitters popped up. You can have rational discourse on IRC, an email list, or even through instant messaging.

throwing away the whole internet because Xitter sucks is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

I know you're being hyperbolic here, but unfortunately there are a lot of people now who really do see social media as "the whole Internet". And they have thrown a lot away as a result.

This is a good point. It's like asking the question: "What is more important in politics? People, or ideas?"

People respond very differently to that. To some it's people, and to some it's ideas. That is why you have Xitter-like microblogging which is focused around people, and reddit-like communities which are focused around topics/ideas.

Does making horrible horrible things in CK2 count as creation? If not I am simply creating a mess of my life.

Yeah its sad computing is dying because of ipads. Lot of people.dont even have a computer.

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

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

Although I love Lemmy, I find it will be hard to recommend a normal young person to hop on Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, Misskey, Iceshrimp, etc. Most people on here talk about tech and politics. If you scroll through the main feed, you won't get stuff from other communities unless you seek it out.

Not diverse enough, but once it gets diverse, it will probably enshitify and make the community mainstream garbage. Then we're back to square one with people making clickbait posts and attention seeking people.

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.

... If there are people to mislead with misinformation, or people with money to buy things, there will be incentive. I learned about this in this great book called

Exactly. Once we are a mainstream page to visit, it will go down as fast as any other page like this before.

And for the same reasons folks got hooked on old reddit, folks get hooked on Lemmy (its me I'm folks please unplug me from the machine I can't log out)

Yeah decentralization and open source software and protocols being big ones. It means that if the "main" culture turns reactionary, that we're not trapped in the same spaces as the shithead just because we share a platform.

There could absolutely be two main fediverses, with no changes to the technology.

I beg to disagree.

The reason all these delusional posts getting even upvoted to begin with is due to many like-minded people are gathered together in the same sub. As an example, reddit's r/democrats and r/republicans. One is clearly more sane than another, yet try to say something in a wrong sub - get downvoted to oblivion. But if you spill your delusional shit in a r/republicans - upvotes galore and comments of praise.

Facebook groups are the same shit. And so is Lemmy. One thing in hexbear that is allowed could/will be the reason you got a ban in .world. Up/Downvotes cant fix that.

tl;dr Village idiots can join together to accumulate their own conspiracies in a big ass circlejerk, and social media has no power to stop it.

Reddit has downvotes. That hasn't saved it from misinformation, trolls, and radicalization.

They left entirely? Not just tuned out the group until the topic of conversation moved on?

Or do everything within your reach to make everything an echo chamber, cough cough fandom gatekeepers being toxic to people they don't like and think are responsible to changes to their beloved media.

As long as the devs have an instance-agnostic 'live and let live' attitude and just ignore any instances they don't politically like and advise others to do the same, it's not really a problem.

If they ever try to enforce their ideology via their code: actual issue.

(for me the main one are the tankie scum devs)

This right here is the crux of the problem and why the problem goes back so much further than the design and algorithms of platforms. We teach kids to focus on individual achievement, to celebrate the self, and we don't teach empathy, something that needs to be taught young and can easily be taught but the west increasingly considers weakness and a dirty word.

When we fail to teach citizens of a society collectivism, because being a member of a society means you are part of a collective whether you decide to be a good collective that functions or one that operates against itself (herp derp competition!) that does not, you get communication between members like this.

"I hate these people fuck them they should me more like MEEEE" "their opinions suck because they aren't more like MIIIINE" and we act as a bunch of petulant infants that resent each other's very existence in OUR world.

If we were taught that it is our responsibility to lift one another up, if we rewarded people in society on the basis of who and how many others they've helped and not how much they hoarded for THEMSELVES, this wouldnt be as much of a problem. We could, now that we don't have to survive in nature, orient our mindsets to the positive, which would have to be encouraged young. Instead we're made to be like... This. A useful state for killing a rival in YOUR hunting area when there's only enough game in the region for one tribe to survive the winter, not so much when trying to build a civilization up. And don't get me started on the counterproductive mindfuck that is nation states and super serious imaginary lines between them, meant to protect hoards of INDIVIDUAL wealth of respective elites.

The problem is, how do you start such a virtuous cycle when everyone from the owners down are only concerned with "ME ME ME MINE MINE MINE?"

Then again you hate tankies, so go ahead and cuss me out for calling out the reality that capitalism, especially when it has effectively conquered the culture, turns people into selfish little gremlins more likely to shoot a stranger than help them.