Social media has become a freak show(natesilver.net)
natesilver.net
Social media has become a freak show
https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show
8 comments
I was one of these publishers caught in the war with facebook. I lost 10 million fans and any respect I had left for FB.
By the time a FB doom scroller makes it to you outside of Facebook they are cooked. 0 attention, 0 retention, diminishing returns (if you paid for it).
By the time a FB doom scroller makes it to you outside of Facebook they are cooked. 0 attention, 0 retention, diminishing returns (if you paid for it).
Part of the issue is that a huge number of people have quiet quit social media. They’ve just left, or at least they rarely visit.
What’s left is brain rot and its addicts.
What’s left is brain rot and its addicts.
It goes deeper than that. What happened was a hugely tiny minority of very loud people festered in Tumblr and Reddit, and Reddit became the single most censored site on the internet, eclipsing China. The number of censorship actions individually in 2012 to 2016 eclipsed China, just on Reddit alone. And nobody wants to say that or even acknowledge it or even look at it, and we're on an internet site about communications on the internet, and not a single person has ever stated that fact. They destroyed Reddit; that's the dead internet theory. Reddit is back to faking it, but there's never going to be a chance to kickstart something like Reddit. That's why they're actually trying to resurrect other websites now.
So this tyrannical mob of minorities destroyed Reddit, and now they have to metastasize and they have to go to other places. So they ironically started using other websites, but actually that's just because they found new ways to get that dopamine hit of controlling other people's behaviors and actions through censorship, and that's what drives them. So you're right; people quit, but wherever they go on any site, basically, there's no safe spaces left for free speech; there's only safe spaces left for censorship.
Brain rot and content don't even come into the equation. That's just throughput. I think we hit peak conversation around about 2017, and I think the well-known surface area where people can actually write coherently in a way that gets read got erased, and now it's balkanized in substacks and short-form video, and everything that used to be comment is now commentary, and you have to talk, you have to listen to some bobblehead talking, and then the comment section is nothing; nobody reads it; there's no conversation happening anymore. And that was deleted by the tyrannical minority who took every surface they could and destroyed it.
So this tyrannical mob of minorities destroyed Reddit, and now they have to metastasize and they have to go to other places. So they ironically started using other websites, but actually that's just because they found new ways to get that dopamine hit of controlling other people's behaviors and actions through censorship, and that's what drives them. So you're right; people quit, but wherever they go on any site, basically, there's no safe spaces left for free speech; there's only safe spaces left for censorship.
Brain rot and content don't even come into the equation. That's just throughput. I think we hit peak conversation around about 2017, and I think the well-known surface area where people can actually write coherently in a way that gets read got erased, and now it's balkanized in substacks and short-form video, and everything that used to be comment is now commentary, and you have to talk, you have to listen to some bobblehead talking, and then the comment section is nothing; nobody reads it; there's no conversation happening anymore. And that was deleted by the tyrannical minority who took every surface they could and destroyed it.
I agree about tiny loud minorities, but would also add the 4chan incubated fash stuff alongside Tumblr and parts of Reddit.
As far as censorship goes, it’s clear that the deeper problem is that mega social media doesn’t scale. When the aforementioned loud obnoxious minorities invade, it becomes totally untenable.
If you don’t censor you end up with either a Nazi bar or a Tumblr struggle session. If you do censor you end up with either a boring milquetoast platform or a censored echo chamber that just reflects the beliefs of the people running it. None of those things are appealing to most people.
As a medium for real communication it just doesn’t scale. Places like HN are tolerable because they’re small enough to be actually moderated and to self police. This is also why real discourse has moved to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Signal, and private sites.
Maybe brain rot is the platforms attempt to fill the void left by the fact that discourse doesn’t scale. This might alter my view slightly. My take has been that platforms push brain rot to be addictive, and there may be truth in that, but maybe that was more a later move to try to save the platform’s user numbers after the collapse of social media as a productive discourse medium in the late 20-teens.
In the end it’s that social media just failed.
As far as censorship goes, it’s clear that the deeper problem is that mega social media doesn’t scale. When the aforementioned loud obnoxious minorities invade, it becomes totally untenable.
If you don’t censor you end up with either a Nazi bar or a Tumblr struggle session. If you do censor you end up with either a boring milquetoast platform or a censored echo chamber that just reflects the beliefs of the people running it. None of those things are appealing to most people.
As a medium for real communication it just doesn’t scale. Places like HN are tolerable because they’re small enough to be actually moderated and to self police. This is also why real discourse has moved to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Signal, and private sites.
Maybe brain rot is the platforms attempt to fill the void left by the fact that discourse doesn’t scale. This might alter my view slightly. My take has been that platforms push brain rot to be addictive, and there may be truth in that, but maybe that was more a later move to try to save the platform’s user numbers after the collapse of social media as a productive discourse medium in the late 20-teens.
In the end it’s that social media just failed.
> What’s left is brain rot and its addicts.
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I say thank God for Nate Silver for educating the masses that the internet has weirdness on it.
Without Nate, what would we do? Who would be there to tell us that the internet has weirdness? 15 years after articles talking about algorithms and echochambers?
Without Nate, how can we point to some completely incorrect numbers and some completely obvious observations, whether it's obviously true or obviously false? We just need the obvious from Nate. Wow, imagine waking up every day and just desperately scrabbling to find some semblance of usefulness and utility in your existence.