The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20220522123717/https://cybergrunge.net/socialmedia.html
Hey, I know that being condescended to by someone that has quit using
social media feels bad. I try not to shame people for using it. I used
social media hours and hours a day. I'm just trying to help others
recover from it and try to think of other ways to interact online.
work in progress.
Table of Contents
Content You Never Asked For
Gambling & Infinite Feeds
Love, Hate, Repeat
Mark Hates Users
Advertising Scams
Real Name Policy
Content You Never Asked For
One of the things maybe that this should highlight is the way
that on "web2.0" platforms, specifically via the infinite feed, we are bombarded with content that we had no choice in seeing.
This in itself, you would think, would be offputting - after all we
hate seeing advertisements when we are going about our daily life, we
hate being harassed by a random stranger while walking around, we hate
neighbors who are loud and rude when we are trying to relax.
All of these things though are basically what we accept via the layout of infinite-feed social media: a bunch of stuff we never asked for, given to us by a black box algorithm we can never understand and which might even be intentionally designed to hurt us.
Gambling & Infinite Feeds
I was talking to a friend who had never used Myspace before. One of the
immediate things that they were flabbergasted by was that Myspace didn't
have an infinite-scrolling news feed. How did people find content to engage with?
Well, on Myspace there were messaging groups you could join that
were basically like mailing lists, but then main way that people
interacted was by commenting on each others' profiles. Especially having
used infinite-feed platforms so long, this seems bizarre.
You had to actually go to someone's page to interact with them, and the primary content
of the platform is interactions themselves: people read the comments on
each others profiles, read people's interests and about me and browsed
their photos and notes (little blog entries).
One of the tricks of gambling and why it is so addictive to people is
the randomness itself - you never know when you will win big, or win a
small prize, etc, so every time it happens you feel grateful and lucky
and good. This is basically what the infinite feed does to us, and what
the notification systems do.
We might complain that a lot of our feed is "irrelevant" content, that
many notifications we get are "bogus" notifications that are
meaningless. This is part of the design and addictive nature though. It is exactly because genuinely meaningful things are nested between "annoying" and "pointless" content which makes the act of checking more satisfying.
Checking in itself is a compulsive habit that makes us feel in control. When we check, we may not have control of what we see, but we can judge and respond to what we check, and that act of "judging" and "evaluating" the thing being checked is satisfying to us in itself, regardless of the content.
Love, Hate, Repeat
Even worse, the more extreme the random reward or "punishment" is, the more addictive it gets.
You would think that after getting into a heated argument or flame war
or harassment battle on social media, it would sour you on using it.
In fact, it does the opposite! Traumatic, painful and unpleasant experiences actually keep us using the platform
similar to how abusers will hurt us, and then turn around and offer us
something nice to "make up" for it, which makes us confused and kills
our ego and sense of autonomy. Negative experiences on social media do
the same thing to us, we are drawn back in because of how extreme the negative emotions are mixed with the "making up" for it with content we like or need.
Mark Hates Users
Judging from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as having said
people who using facebook are "fucking idiots" and that the site was
designed to rank women by attractiveness, it isn't surprising that these
abusive tactics are used, and it wouldn't be surprising if they are
actually very intentionally planned.
Advertising Scams
If you have ever had the misfortune of running a page on Facebook or many other Web2.0 platforms, you might have been suckered into paying for on-platform advertising.
You may have, like me, paid for ads only to realize that not
only has the platform taken your money and simply fed your page a bunch
of fake bot "likes" or follows, but that you have actually paid money
to destroy your own page because those low-engagement likes and follows de-prioritize your page!
I thankfully didn't spend much more than $30 on ads on Facebook, but the fact that that money not only didn't help but hurt my page is absolutely infuriating.
Real Name Policy
These web2.0 platforms require your real name. If you have talked
to any trans person, you will realize how problematic this policy is,
but furthermore if you have ever been harassed or stalked on these
platforms you will realize that stalkers and nefarious actors using
fake names almost never get banned, but Domestic Violence victims, trans
folks, sex workers, are regularly banned for not using their real
names. Is this surprising? I'd like to see some research on this, because everyone i know only has anecdotal evidence, but Facebook consistently lies and makes excuses for this type of stuff so why would research on the harms or maliciousness effect anything?