I don’t think you have to be a doctor to come to this conclusion. After therapy I realised that the most traumatic thing that took the longest to get over wasn’t watching my Dad die, it was watching him suffer through futile attempts to prolong his life by a few days in intensive care. I wish the doctors had been clearer with us about his chances of survival, I wish we had been brave/knowledgable enough to accept that it was the end and I vow never to put my loves ones through that when my time comes.
I think honestly they shied away from really clearly saying this was the end until a couple of hours before he died when really I believe it was clear at least a few days out. For some reason through their communication, bouncing between different doctors and clearly some overwhelming emotions on our part, we thought he had a chance of coming back from the brink so made some decisions in his behalf I wish we hadn’t.
2015 for me too. I wonder if there was some early day over juicing of the attention mechanism that put people off in that year, before they tuned it to reduce churn…
It was a big year for the culture war. People who had previously been cordial suddenly needed to fight each other over politics and other controversies of the day. The rest of us watched this happen, then slowly backed away.
It wasn’t even that for me. No one was posting anything political right or left back then. Just one day the newsfeed went from chronological posts of friends to littered with the bs you see today. Why even post when no one is going to see it. And then of course the natural march of life where people have less time to bother with that and no longer care if Stacy from English class liked the homecoming photos or not.
2014-15 was when the news feed switched from static, human-written code to machine learning models optimized to maximize ad revenue[1], the models discovering "user attention time" was a far better metric to optimize for than clicks, likes or shares[2]. And what people spent the most "attention time" on was content that triggered raw moral outrage, fear and tribal hostility[3].
This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.
Yeah but I think it just took some year for ppl to notice.
2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers.
Also videos started to be posted around that time?
I remember I left around that time too because they started aggressively trying to defeat adbockers. I'd rather just leave the platform completely than see a single ad.
Tinfoil hat time but I think they definitely did _something_ at that time that "changed" the system. It's the Cambridge Analytica/Trump time and I believe that FB definitely "changed" at the same time.
After Cambridge Analytica, my "intelligent" friends basically abandoned the platform, while my distant conspiracy inclined uncles started posting baseless slop.
Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution? Even the word broadcast implies something very one way. Pre social media it was very normal to “broadcast” by discussing ideas with friends, family and neighbours, face to face in a civil manner. Good ideas gained traction gradually, bad ideas didn’t get traction because the extremists were too far apart. A nice natural protection against extremes.
> Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution?
No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.
There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.
I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.
Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
> Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
The Internet itself is just a way to transfer information. Humans are the ones manipulating that information for commercial and ideological reasons. I would say as several posters above have implied we have not evolved filters that protect us from this manipulation. Quite the opposite we have biases baked into us that are being actively exploited.
What we have done wrong is not find a way to manage this for the benefit of society rather than its harm, sadly that describes much of human history. When an environment exists that amplifies self serving behavior and concentration of power it is not surprising to see it come to reflect the worse rather than best of humanity.
And Meta have made their social media platforms anti-social. Once upon a time, Facebook was primarily a place to keep up with your friends. But now it's trying to divert you away from people you actually know and instead try to make you consume an endless feed of slop.
(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)
I really wonder where this idea that the world was less polarized before social media is coming from. It's not even 100 years ago that we had some of the most extreme ideologies in history taking hold all over both Europe and the USA (fascism, socialism, and others). People literally went to war over these things. Another ~100 years before that, French people were cutting off the heads of their ruling class, and setting prisoners free.
If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.
Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.
I am having implement some suggestions from one of these tools on our developer portal right now from a tool marketing has bought to review our presence in model results. What’s more these “results” are presented to me processed by another model in prose. I can’t quite shake the feeling I’m implementing changes suggested by a stochastic model based on a limited set of search’s on other stochastic models. So many layers of probability, how on earth can it be trusted!
Don’t use it for coding. Well at least using it for everything around coding rather than just coding itself was my aha moment, I realised I could understand new codebases way faster, brainstorm, sense check ideas draft better thought out arguments to my perspective and generally ask stupid questions. All of which has significantly increased my learning as a developer. Using it for coding itself is another matter.
Because that would kill your ability and ruin what ever experience you had. And without that, your "reviews" and "signing" off of the LLMs actions would end up being just performative quite fast.
Define better. Faster to literally write the code - LLM. Deeper understanding of how it works - write yourself. Less skill atrophy - write yourself. More fun - write yourself. You can argue all these points and they’ll be different for everyone, but my feeling is that everything I listed in the original comment are clear additives to my process/learning.
Totally agree. Setting the tone is so important. It’s so bad it’s “illegal” is a lot more convincing than saying to your kid, “well the research shows…”
Totally. The next step is a national campaign explaining how apple screen time and android family works. In the Uk we had a lot of shock adverts for drinking driving. The same thing with online harms would go a long way.
> they’ll also lose access to educational videos on YouTube, local events on Facebook, and potentially cut off from distant friends and family.
Cmon, if you’re trying to make the case for how essential social media is for children under the age of 16, please find some better examples. As if there are no other sources of educational content online than YouTube and anyone who has left Facebook knows the last two points are simply not true. This is so weak from the EFF.
This is insane.