This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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 OfferUp has also superceded Craigslist in my area and I think the user history and reputation system plays a role there.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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I think Jon Stewart and John Oliver should promote socialism without even saying socialism. Seriously!
