this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Yeah let's spread misinformation and romanticize the past so we can blame our problems on bad actors and bad times rather than recognize and address the systemic causes that have pervaded social media since its inception.
sorry for being so salty and sarcastic, in a weird mood rn
Systems are made of people. So yeah, remove the bad actors and you already have a better system.
Systems are also made of rules, and bad rules can turn good people into bad people. That's kind of the point of critical race theory
People have to make the rules, and choose if they enforce them, and choose if they obey them. Ultimately, it comes back to people.
Yeah, but psychological factors decide whether people obey and conform, as demonstrated by Milgram and Asch. Changing the situation changes whether they'll go along with a bad system.
Good people don’t turn into bad people. By default that rules them out of being good people.
Everyone has a price, and everyone can be led down the wrong path. I mean, the supposed "good guys" in all of this were laughing and cheering at a man being murdered in front of his wife and kids just last week. I wonder how many of them, even just 5 years ago, would have done that? But they see the assholes on the "bad side do it" and all of sudden its ok.
Social media has fucked all of our brains. whether its tiktok, facebook reddit, instagram, lemmy, whatever. Its made us weird about information, and the opinions that we have. The downvotes give us little dopamine hits. So we start to want the uparrows. Then we get weird about the uparrows, moaning that people are misunderstanding what we are saying. Then we cant risk the uparrows, so we just say whatever everyone else is saying. Whatever gets us our fix.
And anyone reading this disagrees, I would ask you how often you look at your profile to make sure your comments are all getting upvotes... Social media has been programming us for years. And this is now what it looks like. Radicalisation of the left and right, to the point we raging over people using bathrooms, finding joy in other peoples misery, and worst of all we are ignoring the real world for it. We all need a big reset to rehinge our damaged brain function.
Fuck yeah I'm happy Kirk is dead. He was a mass murderer, he just did it with a camera instead of a knife. I take glee in knowing his reign of terror is at an end, and I think it's funny that he was stopped halfway through making an asinine point about transgender gun violence.
We need to label MAGA a terrorist organization, then go after them as if they are ISIS, then go global: AfD, the oil industry, etc.
All should be labeled terrorists.
Pretty sure you already are, mate.
Mob violence has been a thing for all of human history. Before humans, even: chimpanzee groups, if they get large, will split into two groups. After a few months apart, if the groups encounter each other, the stronger group will murder every individual in the weaker one.
I think we had settled on a regulated and normalized system in pre-internet media that moderated the mob violence tendencies. Our current polarization is not really that social media created this new thing in society, it's that it removed the guardrails in traditional media that were suppressing natural human tendencies. I hope we can figure out and implement some new guardrails sooner rather than later.
Nah, I dont by that. Thats the same kind of logic that rapists use. "She was wearing a short skirt, and I just couldnt help myself". The fact is, social media in its current form is basically using gambling mechanics to get everyone to do weird shit. Comments on reddit, or facebook, or twitter are basically one armed bandits. Each tuck/comment is hoping for a win to get a little dopamine hit. Thats the long and the short of it. This has been going on for so long now, that people are radicalised by it.
Our brains are hard-wired to be susceptible to specific patterns. Ancestral humans who stayed in good graces with their social group, even when the leaders of that group were factually mistaken, survived at higher rates than humans whose respect for facts drove them to reject or be rejected by the group. The details of which and to what degree we have these triggers override our rationality varies by genetics and environment, but we are all susceptible.
That a very significant percent of humans respond to their system by adopting specific harmful behavior is not something we can fight by moral condemnation. Labeling them as bad people is unproductive. If the goal is to actually reduce the harmful behavior, addressing the system - not the individuals - is the only effective strategy.
Well then if you ever ate meat, you were never a good person. But I think people can be corrupted and they can be redeemed, and people who eat meat because society encourages it can be rehabilitated.
So all those people who are medically unable to follow a vegan diet are evil because...
How is it meats problem here?
Eating meat is mean, it's just an example of a bad thing a lot of people do. The point is we've all done bad things, but we can all be redeemed if we stop doing bad things. Like eating meat.
eating meat is not mean
Yes it is. Animals need that meat inside their bodies, taking it is stealing.
they're dead before they're butchered. they're butchered before they're sold. eating meat can't possibly be mean. a dead butchered animal doesn't need it's meat.
Killing doesn't make stealing okay
I never suggested it does. I said eating meat isn't mean.
Trump and Hitler too?
Fair point. My rebuttal: The system here is manifold, a lack of general awareness and understanding, the legislative framework in most places, and most importantly, capitalism. The owners of social media are the most replaceable part of that, if Meta and Zuck imploded today, some other for-profit crap would fill the void
Nah you're right. I'll admit to having a bit of nostalgia for the old timey corp platforms of my youth, but tbh what we have now (with fedi) is better.
I do still think there was and is real value in independent little niche forums hosted on random domains, not federated to anything or linked to any social media or platform or anything. Just a cozy little phpbb or discourse between friends.
forums are the best. i encounter ex-redditors here on the threadiverse who are like "well at least discord is better than old school forums" and i'm like "what am i missing that everyone thinks old school forums are so horrid"
I don't get it either, but I've seen the same perception. My own partner said "but aren't forums... dangerous?" like BRO we MET on a forum and you think that?? They thought all forums were reactionary chans, and what they used was just a website where people chat.
But yeah discord sucks.
Forums were a bit painful to use comparatively, having to page through threads trying to find info lol, necro bumping, spam bots...etc lol
I do remember running a cracked version of vbulletin on a rando free hosting site tho for my friends lol
Are the people running modern social media not part of the system?
Valid question but IMO, no. replacing Zuckerberg Musk etc would do nothing to solve the fact that capitalism runs social media as a for-profit enterprise
yup! the real problem is the venture capitalists who run the internet as a financial market centered around the attention economy
are you still alive, Nazi?
You shouldn't let consumers off the hook entirely. Every time some idiot buys new mop they saw on TikTok or a Dubai chocolate bar they are pumping money into the system and reinforcing the idea that spying on us and clogging our space with advertising is a viable business.
IMO ad blocking is not only a quality of life improvement, it's a moral imperative.
i was thinking of doing an essay about this very concept. advertisers are complicit in, and profit from, a multitude of disasters, both natural and human made. all ad dollars are blood money
It's part of what I find so frustrating with the American discourse on drugs. We talk about the drug trade in the United States as if innocent victims in America are being poisoned against their will by foreign bad actors.
In reality American consumers have pumped so much drug money into their neighboring countries that the cartels are a threat their governments.
The cartels and the dealers are very bad guys, but the consumer's hands are not clean.
having grown up in an area ravaged by the drug trade i'd say you're on the right track but missing the mark a little. the drug trade is fueled by people who are absolutely desperate for any relief from the ravages of the reality we live in, and frequently who starts people on a drug course is a doctor prescribing opioids in a high risk case.
what i think most americans miss is that the drug trade's perpetrators are not foreign cartels, but domestic tax evaders and billionaires. the republicans are sicking ice on immigrants and using fentanyl as their justification, but the opioids are grown here in america largely along the appalachian spine. the flow of drugs is less into the us than people estimate and has more to do with exports than imports than most realize.
if the republicans REALLY wanted to cut down the drug trade, here's what they'd do:
but of course conservatives won't do any of that because if they did they wouldn't be conservatives. they profit from all these broken systems being broken, so they keep them broken.