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I want to talk about whether or not phones and social media are bad for the brain and why People have more immediate access to eachother but loneliness is a huge problem and that seems weird to me. I'm just a dummy though so maybe other goons are smarter and can post about whether or not phones are good here. Does anybody here try to limit their screen time and has noticed mental health stuff from being on the computer or phone a lot? I don't notice much of an effect myself but I'm on the computer for work (and I touch it! I touch the computer! Epic lul ftw) but I spend a bunch of time doing outside poo poo and never really take pics of it or post it on social media so maybe that's a reasonable balance? But I also definitely notice that it's harder to get people to do social stuff now than it was even just before the pandemic. Sound off in the comments below and be sure to hit that like and subscribe button
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May 10, 2023 14:46
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I feel like facebook has moved away from being a place to stay in contact with your friends, casual acquaintances, and distant relatives. But despite the fact that it has been gradually getting shittier for the last 15 years, nothing really seems to have replaced it as a "friending" network. Even though that was the original point of social media. So even though we're more online than ever it feels harder to use online as a way to maintain real world relationships. The only big attempt to fill that void I can think of was Google Plus and look at how much of a failure that turned out to be. I think it's true that people are on average becoming more and more socially isolated even though in theory they have more means to keep in contact with each other. But modern social media feels like it is more focused on influencers building up a following than friendship networks. I guess close friend groups can be maintained through a group chat of some kind. But the cool thing about facebook was the ability to look up someone you only distantly knew. Without having to have anyone connect the two of you through any common thing other than you were both on this one huge website. idk if I worded that well but it's something I've been thinking about a lot
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May 10, 2023 16:37
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I don't think social media is inherently unhealthy but it is unnatural. The only healthy social media is when you know the people in real life and you're just shooting the poo poo and not taking things too seriously. Like a group chat or a small forum where everyone knows each other. Once it turns in to this big corporate thing with millions of people and ads everywhere it's like a our little ape brains can't really process what we're actually doing. It starts to turn to this metric game of numbers and followers and poo poo and people naturally start to form little tribes based on common interest. At least meetup.com is still a thing. That's the only good one imo
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May 10, 2023 18:38
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ive instructed my monumental mason to chisel "forums arent social media" into my marker
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May 10, 2023 18:45
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The Saucer Hovers posted:ive instructed my monumental mason to chisel "forums arent social media" into my marker they are imo, but of a radically different character to the big boys. i think this mostly revolves around forums historically being a more niche enterprise, often focused on a single umbrella of topics, like a particular video game or genre of music. this kept populations low enough that you couldnt really curate your experience because there simply wasnt enough content to do that. though maybe it was because the populations were much lower generally than social media today, where we try to cram the entire world population into like 4 websites. also, of course, that most forums were run as hobbyist projects rather than profit-seeking businesses
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May 10, 2023 19:03
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croup coughfield posted:they are imo, but of a radically different character to the big boys. i think this mostly revolves around forums historically being a more niche enterprise, often focused on a single umbrella of topics, like a particular video game or genre of music. this kept populations low enough that you couldnt really curate your experience because there simply wasnt enough content to do that. though maybe it was because the populations were much lower generally than social media today, where we try to cram the entire world population into like 4 websites. The biggest part of what makes social media insidious is The Algorithm probably. Web 1.0 stuff like SA where everything is just listed based on the last time the database has been updated is de-optimized in a way where you can't really have exactly what will make you most likely to Engage With The Algorithm, usually meaning whatever makes you the most mad online, blasted directly into your cerebral cortex. But I mean we can see through psychos like Guy Mann and Seraph and several others that even forums can be too much for some people's brains, but I wouldn't be surprised if they also struggle with maintaining relationships in real life FreeRangeHexagon posted:I think it's true that people are on average becoming more and more socially isolated even though in theory they have more means to keep in contact with each other. But modern social media feels like it is more focused on influencers building up a following than friendship networks. Yeah, social media seems more like a thing you can do to market your brand, rather than share anything authentic. As funny as it is to see somebody put E/N poo poo on Facebook, that seems like it's more in line with what healthy social interactions are online with real friends than constantly filtering everything through some abstract idea of a brand
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May 10, 2023 20:16
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i agree that the algo is bad and is an outgrowth of the profit motive but im saying that lacking an algo doesnt make forums definitionally different than say, reddit or twitter. they're a spin-off focused on raking in $$$$$ instead of posting for the love of hte game
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May 10, 2023 20:21
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sub of theseus
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May 10, 2023 20:21
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croup coughfield posted:i agree that the algo is bad and is an outgrowth of the profit motive but im saying that lacking an algo doesnt make forums definitionally different than say, reddit or twitter. they're a spin-off focused on raking in $$$$$ instead of posting for the love of hte game ah, i see what you mean
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May 10, 2023 20:22
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capitalism, baby!
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May 10, 2023 20:22
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The one thing I'm certain about is that it's really bad for children. With adults it's less clear (it's probably not good, but there are far bigger societal issues affecting the mental health of adults).
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May 10, 2023 20:25
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Ytlaya posted:The one thing I'm certain about is that it's really bad for children. With adults it's less clear (it's probably not good, but there are far bigger societal issues affecting the mental health of adults). If anybody here has had sex before, I wonder what sort of things you notice about your kids or their friends' social media habits that seems hosed up in particular? Like we all have seen what social media has done to the brains of our parents since they were mostly just dumped right into it all without any sort of web 1.0 buildup like we experienced where we could see and experience the rise of social media from the ashes of the DotCom bubble, but that can't possibly be as horrifying as, like, being 10 years old and not knowing a world before the most insidious forms of social media bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m has issued a correction as of 20:30 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 20:28
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I can't remember where I first read it, but a while ago I saw someone say that Facebook is where you go to watch the midlife crisis of a guy who was in a couple of your classes in high school, and IME that's closer to the truth than you'd think. That probably fits all of the big-name social media platforms too. As for me, I try to limit my social media time specifically (including less mainstream stuff like these forums and Discord) but I'm almost always butting up against my daily allotment lol. I think part of that is needing a quick brain break from my day, but not having the time or desire to do something more involved like a book/TV show/game. Probably a bit of an undiagnosed attention span issue in there too. Koishi Komeiji posted:I don't think social media is inherently unhealthy but it is unnatural. The only healthy social media is when you know the people in real life and you're just shooting the poo poo and not taking things too seriously. Like a group chat or a small forum where everyone knows each other. This pretty much sums up the "good" time that I spend on social media these days - I'm either chopping it up with people who I'm able to interact with in real life, or people with whom I have a specific shared interest (and sometimes both!). I've fallen out of touch with loads of people who fit those categories at some point previously, but who no longer do. C-Euro has issued a correction as of 03:12 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 20:33
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YouTube is another site which, despite getting gradually worse over time, seems to have a monopoly that no one can challenge. Just like facebook. I guess there's vimeo and dailymotion, and some sites that are popular in none English speaking counies. idk though, they seem to have their own niche that's a bit different to youtube. The sites most similar to youtube are all full of nothing but weird guys complaining about wokeness and 15 minute cities. I guess hosting web videos is expensive. So it's already a hard field to compete in. But the fact that the most popular video hosting site is owned by the company with the most popular search engine and the most popular web browser also seems kind of unfair.
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May 11, 2023 02:57
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:If anybody here has had sex before, I wonder what sort of things you notice about your kids or their friends' social media habits that seems hosed up in particular? This is less social media and more access to stuff like YouTube (though there could be other causes, since it's not exactly possible to control for anything), but my mom as a first grade teacher noticed a dramatic decrease in student attention spans starting around 2010 or so. Social media just sounds extremely unhealthy for teenagers/kids for the same reason it's unhealthy for adults, but magnified by a lot due to the vulnerability and immaturity of the people in question. It basically takes existing difficult social dynamics and distorts/exaggerates them. On the upside, it sounds like kids aren't really using traditional social media these days? Like there's Tiktok or whatever, but that isn't really a network in the same sense as, say, Facebook.
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May 11, 2023 03:06
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:If anybody here has had sex before, I wonder what sort of things you notice about your kids or their friends' social media habits that seems hosed up in particular? I have a kid who's just over a year old and I'm praying that social media in its current form has collapsed by the time he's old enough to be interested in it. Then again, something even worse could just take its place.
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May 11, 2023 03:12
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C-Euro posted:I have a kid who's just over a year old and I'm praying that social media in its current form has collapsed by the time he's old enough to be interested in it. Then again, something even worse could just take its place. like mmorpgs?
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May 11, 2023 04:02
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Something awful is social media op and yes
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May 11, 2023 04:50
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i deleted most of the apps on my phone that let me interface with people needlessly and it has been pretty good for my brain OP im reading way more books and generally using my time better & my brain works better posting is brain poison
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May 11, 2023 04:51
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They say when you touch computer, computer touch you back. Dare you risk it?
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May 11, 2023 05:20
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Riot Bimbo posted:i deleted most of the apps on my phone that let me interface with people needlessly and it has been pretty good for my brain OP my time has zero value and is literally impossible to waste
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May 11, 2023 06:06
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social media apps that algorithmically serve extra content to prolong engagement are the worst offenders started an instagram account as a way to keep up with a smaller circle of friends and it eventually deduced that if it showed me a video of a dog after i ran out of friends' content, i'd be distracted enough to stay on the app. now i'm awash in dog content (much of which is stolen and introduced misleadingly but oops i stared at the dog too long). every time i zone out with the app open, it's essentially probing my brain for weak points where it can hook me with additional subjects. it also (with an ad tracking assist, I assume) managed to convince my mother in law she needed to lose weight, shortly after she started an account, and it and hammered her with so much weight loss influencer and ad content that she started getting extremely depressed before my wife figured out what was happening and intervened. i nuked my twitter shortly after the sale and eventually got on mastodon, and it's remarkable how much more liberating it feels to think "welp, that's all the recent posts, time to go do something else," instead of getting slowly lured into endless doomscrolling that was a signature mode of twitter engagement. this all feels of-a-piece with the LLMs getting pushed into search engines; the stagnation of the tech industry is drowning us all in the most low quality content as they flail around trying to goose engagement, and it's going to get much worse. in the meantime, a lot of people are getting fed content that has or will make them absolutely loving insane.
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May 11, 2023 07:10
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Innocuous posted:i nuked my twitter shortly after the sale and eventually got on mastodon, and it's remarkable how much more liberating it feels to think "welp, that's all the recent posts, time to go do something else," instead of getting slowly lured into endless doomscrolling that was a signature mode of twitter engagement. Koishi Komeiji posted:I don't think social media is inherently unhealthy but it is unnatural. The only healthy social media is when you know the people in real life and you're just shooting the poo poo and not taking things too seriously. Like a group chat or a small forum where everyone knows each other.
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May 11, 2023 07:23
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i work with a guy who cannot walk 10 feet without staring at his phone the entire time and it's going to be real bad for his brain when he wanders out in front of a forklift some day. feels like being online is just the base state for people now, it's not even about being social it's just content you can consume at every moment you don't have something else to focus on
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May 11, 2023 07:48
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:If anybody here has had sex before, I wonder what sort of things you notice about your kids or their friends' social media habits that seems hosed up in particular? People caring about celebrity drama, not like Beyonce or whatever, but actual micro celebrities and influencers. And beyond caring, actually attacking/defending them in comments.
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May 11, 2023 07:52
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i dont think it's a big deal
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May 11, 2023 07:57
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i think it's good for the brain. after all, platos or davinci or michelangelo were whining about children reading too much books these days so that's exactly the same as the internet and everything turned out ok
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May 11, 2023 08:01
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Innocuous posted:this all feels of-a-piece with the LLMs getting pushed into search engines; the stagnation of the tech industry is drowning us all in the most low quality content as they flail around trying to goose engagement, and it's going to get much worse. in the meantime, a lot of people are getting fed content that has or will make them absolutely loving insane. Designing websites by robotic committee does a bad job?!
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May 11, 2023 09:58
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I think there is something to say that social media as it currently exists doesn't really allow the open and free communication of ideas without being fed through a specific algorithm. Facebook is constrained by people who you already know and it has its own algorithms Tiktok/Instagram are not really designed to communicate only relatively small amounts of information again through algorithms Youtube has a high barrier of entry (video shooting/editing) and it is pretty brutal about the steps you need to go through to get viewership Reddit through its rating system often hides a lot of content because it simply doesn't rise high enough for you to read it unless you are in a very specific subreddit Twitter has its character limit and own sorting system The closest would probably be Discord but even then it is really just chat (and that goes for Whatsapp/Telegram etc) Hell, even 4chan still has that extremely awkward collapsing thread layout that makes actually reading a full thread an agonizing experience. I don't think anything really replaced something like the forums because: the forums are simply inefficient by their design (you can read every post and it doesn't scroll way/get hidden), there is a relative low barrier of entry (versus youtube for example), there is no character limit, and there is very little way to monetize it. Social media can be very damaging, but a lot of the way it is designed and how "community" in terms of most apps is just a concept as usually it is a one way power relationship. (and people will always be people as far as being ugly toward each other) Ardennes has issued a correction as of 12:40 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 10:55
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idk really know how it would have worked, but didn't Jeremy Corbyn want to do some sort of publicly owned social media thing? that seems like a good idea in concept, but creating a government owned social media site seems like it could cause it's own problems. Though if you're in the US at least I'm pretty sure US based social media sites are already happy to harvest your data and hand it over to the government, so I can see people worrying that GovernmentFacebook would be an excuse to violate their privacy. And, yeah, probably. But it's kind of already happening even with everything privatised.
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May 11, 2023 12:14
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FreeRangeHexagon posted:idk really know how it would have worked, but didn't Jeremy Corbyn want to do some sort of publicly owned social media thing? that seems like a good idea in concept, but creating a government owned social media site seems like it could cause it's own problems. Though if you're in the US at least I'm pretty sure US based social media sites are already happy to harvest your data and hand it over to the government, so I can see people worrying that GovernmentFacebook would be an excuse to violate their privacy. And, yeah, probably. But it's kind of already happening even with everything privatised. I would say the problem obviously is how to actually organize it since it is immediately going to become political, and in case of the UK, it would immediately start being used to support up the current government's line ala the BBC. Like I don't thinking literally bringing back message forums is necessarily the answer, but it seems like you could strip out a lot of the "features" of current social media.
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May 11, 2023 12:42
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Innocuous posted:i nuked my twitter shortly after the sale and eventually got on mastodon, and it's remarkable how much more liberating it feels to think "welp, that's all the recent posts, time to go do something else," instead of getting slowly lured into endless doomscrolling that was a signature mode of twitter engagement. This just sounds like you swapped twitter for a more curated version? I do agree twitter has become more openly like 4chan and I go on there less and less now.
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May 11, 2023 14:27
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Web 1.0 forums are lit, I visit some MTG ones still and people talk like MTG hasn't gotten new cards since 2010.
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May 11, 2023 14:31
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Ardennes posted:I would say the problem obviously is how to actually organize it since it is immediately going to become political, and in case of the UK, it would immediately start being used to support up the current government's line ala the BBC. There's a website called SpaceHey that is basically just a remake of 2007 era Myspace, I'm not on it because I don't know of anyone I know personally who happens to be on it. Which is a bit of a paradox I guess. How are they supposed to build a userbase if people don't use it because it doesn't have a userbase? You can't embed music on it either, which was one of the most popular features of og Myspace. Probably because of copyright I guess. idk how I feel about it, I was a teenager when Myspace was at its peak, but I was never on it, I only made a facebook account in 2010 so I could keep in contact with people I went to high school with. But I get the tendencey for old internet nostalgia. The 2000s was also a time when "online" and "irl" felt like two different places. And I feel like they've kind of blended into one another and that's not very healthy. FreeRangeHexagon has issued a correction as of 17:30 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 14:32
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Xaris posted:i think it's good for the brain. agreed
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May 11, 2023 14:35
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i low key think the next step with algorythmically delivered content is you won't even choose which song, podcast, etc, you listen to anymore, or which app you use to watch things/scroll. It'll all be completely curiated to be as addictive for your brain as possible with the only input being the v. occasional pokie machine button click. essentially, pressing the make cookie button on cookie clicker will be as close as to decision making we will have. and we'll loving love it!
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May 11, 2023 15:04
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AnimeIsTrash posted:This just sounds like you swapped twitter for a more curated version? I do agree twitter has become more openly like 4chan and I go on there less and less now. 4chan is lest racist and toxic than Twitter. This is not an endorsement of either.
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May 11, 2023 15:21
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one thing youtube does kind of well is having a lot of old music, like you can find some decently obscure stuff on there, but this mostly assumes that the copyright holders are cool with it. like you can upload a lou donaldson tune from the 60s and it will stay up. but if you were to do like educational material where you break down a Beatles song and like isolate different parts to talk about, it would get taken down almost immediately and you'd get a copyright strike against your account despite it being fair use and obviously beneficial to the Beatles copyright holders. there's a music producer, Rick Beato who has this series called "What Makes this Song Great?" and there's a bunch of bands he won't even touch because as soon as he uploads the video it gets taken down. at least jazz people know there's no money in it so you might as well just keep it up for the 10 people who still care about jazz
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May 11, 2023 15:29
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Yes social media is insane and a lot of posters here would be at least a bit happier if they at least deleted their Twitter apps and did crosswords or something instead
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May 11, 2023 17:22
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SomethingAwful, Youtube, and a Discord server with some buds are all I use these days. Don't even know how people can put up with Twitter anymore, it's hard enough tending to my Youtube recommendations like a zen garden so I don't get bombarded with a million Mr Beast soyfaces, drama poo poo, or 19 year old English/Film majors from Britain giving me 3 hr video essays on Sonic 3 & Knuckles.AnimeIsTrash posted:Web 1.0 forums are lit, I visit some MTG ones still and people talk like MTG hasn't gotten new cards since 2010. All the ones I frequented are dead, it's so awful dude. Everything's moved to Discord or Reddit/Twitter
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May 11, 2023 17:58
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