this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Puts to words a lot of my feelings about mainstream social media.
It's a big ball of algorithms that skew "communication platforms" away from facilitating the thing they were created for.
If you're not spending as much time in comment sections, actually reading what people have to say, and writing responses, as you do scrolling, that media ain't "social".
And the communication that does occur on most platforms, is parasocial. While that's not inherently bad, facilitating only that kind of "exchange", is.
Algorithms are incredibly bad for organic relationships, you should see the thoughts and events around the people you know when they happen, not when some corporation thinks you should be more receptive. Direct feeds and chatrooms are much better at being social environments.
That said, there is an inevitable parasocial aspect to media and that is not necessarily bad. I don't want to build a relationship with actors, even thinking that is a possibility is unhealthy. I just want to see their work for entertainment, and the same applies for many artists and influencers for social media. For that purpose, it wouldn't be too bad to have algorithms, as long as users could tweak them to their own liking. That would help a lot with discoverability.
The problem is that these algorithms are 100% obscured and driven by company interests, such as getting people to scroll forever (and see more ads) by shoving posts which elicit outrage at their face. Even though there are issues I care deeply about, in algorithm driven social media I got into the habit of just skipping and muting whatever is too revolting, because if I so much as browse it too much, they start to show solely that sort of misery, all the time. It's just bad for people's sanity and it doesn't even help anyone at the end of the day.
Well said, your comment reminded me of this essay I recently read by @carl that has a great opening analogy: