Study: Social media probably can't be fixed

I'm not sure the experiment can be done other than to try interventions on real users of a public social media service as Facebook did in the article I linked. Of course people running those services usually don't have the incentives to test harm reduction strategies and certainly don't want to publicize the results.

> the vast majority of users don't create original content

That's true now at least most of the time, but I think it's as much because of design and algorithmic decisions by the platforms to emphasize other types of content. Early Facebook in particular was mostly original content shared between people who knew each other. The biggest problem with that was it wasn't very profitable.

> > There’s no option to create original content...

> While this is true, I'd say the vast majority of users don't create original content either, but still end up shaping the social media environment through the actions that they did model. Again, it's not perfect but I'm more convinced that it might be useful after reading the interview.

Ok, but, this is by design. Other forms of social media, places like Mastodon etc have a far, far higher rate of people creating original content.

LLMs don't learn, though.

The fundamental problem with social media (and many other things) is humans, specifically our biological makeup and (lack of) overriding mechanisms. One could argue that pretty much everything we call 'civilised behavior' is an instance of applying a cultural override for a biological drive. Without it, we are very close to shit-flinging murderous apes.

For so many of our problems what goes wrong is that we fail to stop our biological drive from taking the wheel to the point where we consciously observe ourselves doing things we rationally / culturally know we should not be doing.

Now the production side of media/content/goods evolves very fast and does not have a similarly strong legacy biological drive holding it back, so it is very, very good (and ever improving) at exploiting the sitting duck that is our biological makeup (food engineering, game engineering etc. are very similar to social media engineering in this regard).

The only reliable defense against that is training ourselves to not give in to our biological drives when they are counterproductive. For some that might be 'disconnect completely' (i.e. take away the temptations altogether), but having a healthy approach to encountering the temptations is far more robust. I am of the opinion that labeling the social media purveyors and producers in general as evil abusers is not necessarily inaccurate, but counterproductive in that it tends to absolve individuals of their responsibility in the matter. Imagine telling a heroin addict: "you can't help it, it's those evil dealers that are keeping you hooked to the heroin".

Nonsense. The vast majority of my Facebook friends post at least some original content.

> There are social media apps and platforms that don't do that. They are persistently less popular.

I think that's a bit murky. Facebook became popular when it was like that. They changed how it worked after it was already popular, seeking to make more mony.

Facebook could provide you options to only see friend's content. People have certainly asked for it. They absolutely refuse to.

People want addictions. The answer is to regulate addictive algorithms, not to give them more things to be addicted to.

But addictions are wonderfully useful politically, so that's unlikely to happen.

The point is simple - an algorithm is a form of meta-content. It's curated and designed, not neutral. And so are its commercial, psychological, and political effects.

Currently SM companies have been allowed to use algorithms with little or no oversight. The emphasis has been on regulating privacy, not influence.

In the same way the media need to have a Fairness Doctrine restored to restore sanity and quality to journalism, algorithm providers need to be able to demonstrate an equivalent for their platforms.

This is very much against the spirit of the times, but that spirit is algorithmically created - which just proves the point.

If you're thinking "Yes, but government..." - how do you know that's a spontaneous original thought, and not something you've been deliberately conditioned to believe?

The trouble is people want to smoke and drink, too.

The human mind is more easily exploitable than any computer.

Of course people want to see divisive content. Divisive content is engineered to trigger large emotions, which humans naturally respond to. That's what heroin exists - it feels good. Really, really good. Of course you don't need only good feelongs, bad feelings can shape behavior too.

The problem comes in when we start shifting from making products that simply cause these behavior changes to instead making products engineered to elicit the biggest response possible.

Its very easy to do, too. Want to sell more cigarettes? Add butane to the wrapping so it burns better. Concentrate the nicotine. Do all the obvious stuff. The more bad you make it, the better it will sell.

Same thing with, say, Facebook. Want people to use Facebook more? More doomerism, more lies, more misinformation, more Jesus Christ, more click bait. People want the addictive stuff, that's why we call it addictive.

So yes, social media apps without these tools are unpopular and generally fail. In the same way a nicotine-free cigarette would fail.

More addictive products will always win, because they're more addictive.

That doesn't mean we need to one-up each other and repeatedly hyper optimize until we're making the digital equivalent of fentanyl-laced cigarettes.

Also, we can actually ban stuff. I know it's not a physical product, but that doesn't mean we just have to fucking put up with whatever and deal with it.

We'd never let a company sell fentanyl-laced cigarettes. But when it comes to tech, we all just throw up our hands and say "well we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"

I like to think that humanity is starting to build up some amount of immunity and aversion towards algorithmic feeds. Non-tech friends and family in my life (Norway and the Netherlands) express a rapidly growing discomfort being on Google and Meta's platforms, and some have gone cold turkey, others are actively formulating an exit strategy.

I dropped out of these platforms some years ago and have been very happy having the Fediverse (and HN!) as my only social media. It is just the right amount of engagement and impulse for me. I do not check my feeds compulsively, but occasionally – and the people I follow is a diverse bunch, giving me food for thought and keeping me up to date with topics and software projects.

It is still a niche place to hang out, but I'm OK with that. Now and then, friends get curious enough to join and check it out.

> you now have platforms no one will care about

I would care, and I imagine there are others who would too. I don’t use social media anymore (at all!) because of this. If I could have the chronological feed restored and no intrusion of other content I’d redownload immediately. There must be a market for this.

What do you mean by "no one"? There is definitely demand for such a platform.

You wouldn't as competitors who use these dark patterns should be regulated out of existence in normal countries.

Every other form of mass media is regulated, for good reason.

There's nothing wrong with reposts that are made knowingly by people you follow. My issue is with current dominant social media platforms all focusing on forcing people to see content from outside of their network that they would've otherwise never seen, because neither them, nor the people they follow, would follow anything like that.

> Nothing is preventing people from doing exactly this.

I try my best to do this but it's futile.

See, even if you don't use the algorithm, the algorithm still uses you. So, for example, you can't just discuss something on Twitter with your followers. Sometimes it would decide to show your tweet to a bunch of random people with the radical version of the views opposite to yours, and you will be forced to use the block button way too damn much. You can't opt out of having your tweets recommended to strangers.

Even when that doesn't happen, many of your followers would still miss your posts if you don't appease the algorithm because they would still use the algorithmic feed — whether knowingly or because of all the dark patterns around that setting (it's very hidden, never sticks, or both).

So no, the very existence of the algorithmic feed is the problem, it ruins the experience for everyone regardless of whether they use it or not.

I'm not talking about literal television, but more about something where you don't really get to decide what you see, you go there to get entertained with whatever.

For several years now, they’re mostly one and the same.

You know what I meant.

> Whitelisting solves the problem for me. I curate every tweet I see with a browser extension. Strangers can't kick down the door. I only see content from my direct follows. It dramatically reduces the stress. Maybe a little like horse blinkers.

This extension? https://github.com/rxliuli/mass-block-twitter

How do you find new things to follow? If everyone did this it would be extremely rare to encounter new content.

Do you mind sharing this extension? I would prefer if it also shows the retweets of people you follow as that is an endorsement no matter what people say.

So you are fighting against the platform that you're using. It reminds me about people constantly fighting with their own computer (Windows) to remove ads and crap. In both cases viable alternatives exist which don't require this huge effort.

I see how this works for you and many others but I hate this practice. You are not turning strangers away, you just preemptively shadow-ban everyone.

> I don't really need to see opposing points of view as though they are novel thoughts that I've never considered before

I mean, that's fine, if you think that you can consider all conceivable angles thoroughly, by yourself. I for one welcome opposing views, but I suppose if my idea of that meant "religion or conspiracy theories" I'd probably be avoiding it too.

The old school forums also centered around a single topic or interest, which I think helped keep things focused and more civil. Part of the problem with social media is that it wants to be everything for everyone.

Linear is awful. Discussions are always so bad with them. The only advantage is that following the newest message is easier, which still doesn't prevent people from ignoring them if the thread becomes too long.

The main reason why you might think that way, is less the format, and probably more the moderation, and lower amount of people in those forums. I mean take this forum here, is far better than twitter or any other social media-sloop. Smaller Subreddits, especially with good moderation, are also far better than big Subreddits.

I like old school forums with like an optional chat room for people to sync in real time if they want

The era of sites with a phpbb forum and an irc channel was really fun for me and I miss it a lot

I made lots of friends that way in the past, close friends, and it's unlike anything I've encountered since then with social media

The internet has become a primary battlefield for making money, and we can't go back to the days when it was just a non-commercial hobby that people enjoyed. To make money online, it's crucial to spread content as widely as possible, and the most effective methods for this are clickbait and ragebait. That's why the enshittification of the internet was inevitable.

There's definitely a mass of people who can't/won't/don't get past passive/least-effort relationships with things on screens. These would be the type that in the TV days would simply leave the TV on a specific channel all day and just watch whatever was on, and probably haven't changed their car radio dial from the station they set it to when they bought the car. In modern times they probably have their cable TV they still pay for on a 24 hour news channel and simply have that going all day.

To be fair, in times far past, you really didn't have much choice in TV or radio channels, and I suspect it's this demographic that tend to just scroll down Facebook and take what it gives without much thought other than pressing Like on stuff.

Transparency would prove or disprove this. Release the algorithm and let us decide for ourselves. In my experience, Instagram made an algorithm change 3-4 years ago. It used to be that my feed was exactly my interests. Then overnight my feed changed. It became a mix of 1. interracial relationship success stories 2. scantily clad women clickbait, 3. east asian "craft project" clickbait, and just general clickbait. It felt as if "here's what other people like you are clicking on" became part of the algorithm.

Maybe the TikTok algorithm is better, but the "I don't like this" action on Meta properties just blatantly does not work. I still get the same type of clickbait content no matter how many times I try to get rid of it. Maybe watching other types of Reels would do it, but no thanks.

> Bluesky

FWIW, I've been consistently posting quality stuff on Bluesky for the last year, and despite having a few hundred followers, I get ZERO engagement.

People in the Bluesky subreddit tell me it's not a "post and ghost" platform in that you have to constantly interact with people if you want to earn engagement, but that's too time consuming.

In other words, the discovery algorithm(s) on BlueSky sucks.

Yeah I miss geocities. The pages were ugly, but they were that users ugly ... gloriously personal ugly.

Facebook is not my page, it looks nothing like I want... my content is in many ways the least important thing featured.

Right. When we're talking about the scale of humanity itself, we've moved far past individual actions.

At the scale we're operating, if only 1% is susceptible to these algorithms, that's enough to translate to noticeable social issues and second-order effects.

And it's not 1%.

Another way to put it is, social media is an unregulated drug.

> Probably something decentralized or federated is necessary in my opinion, something in between email and twitter or reddit?

So, Usenet? The medium is the message and all that, sure, but unless you change where the message originates you are ultimately going to still end up in the same place.

Sounds like a return to old school, long term forums. They still exist, but there's a reason Reddit and Twitter took over the "forum space". They toom the core ideas and injected it with "engagement". In this case, with the voting system of reddit, and the follower system of Twitter. Gamefying the act of interacting with peope had effects beyond anyone's comprehension in 2007

Smoking, too, also has useful functions related to socialization. It was a product and drug first, but a social tool second. Half the reason people smoked is because other people did. They wanted to go outside, have a chitchat, and have a smoke.

Now that smoking is gone in the US, a lot of that is dead, and for the worse. A lot of places now don't even have balconies or other outdoor sections. Every piece of area is dedicated towards productive activity, whether that be shopping, working, or eating. There's very little "just sit around" places in modern businesses and workplaces. The joy of random encounter has been significantly decreased. Everything is now in passing.

I think most of the social media power users don't connect with friends and family at all through the platforms. Young Gen Zers just scroll Tiktok (or whatever clone they prefer) and share the ones they like through snapchat/discord/telegram/messenger/sms/whatsapp. Some will post stuff for their friends to see through "close friends" or whatever, but it's much less personal than it once was with Facebook groups and whatnot

'Smoking get's me taking breaks, going outside more, and makes me more social chatting with my coworkers/others on smoke breaks'

[dead]

> It would mean the big social media companies collapsing

And what would be the downside of that? :D

stop using it then.

That sounds interesting. How did that work, did you rent a place for coworking and then opened it up for the social aspect?

That's very interesting. Do you have time to elaborate a bit?

The worst problems with people these days seem to be they don’t pick up the phone. Probability-based polls are still pretty good about most things unless they involve Donald Trump —- it seems some Trump supporters either don’t pick up the phone or lie to pollsters. Some polls correct for this with aggressive weighting but how scientific it really is is up in the air.

Yes and mostly No. No, because I work in games and I've seen enough people thinking that a "good game" just needs pretty graphics and a facsimile of "fun" to know that AI can't ever simulate this. Mkst Humans can't even seem to do it consistently, on all organizational levels.

But i have a footnote of "yes" because as you said, decision makers are just not interested in having this discussion about "focus on making fun games". So it will unfortunately affect my job in the short and even medium terms. Because so much of big money in games these days is in fact not focused on making a game, but on trying to either generate a gambling simulator, an engagement trap, or (you guessed it) AI hype. Both to try and claim you can just poof up assets, and to try and replace labor.

Knowing this, I do have long term plans to break out into my own indie route.

Not really. Sales is doing better than it ever has since I’ve been here. For one thing, AI folks want our data. Despite challenges in the industry, public opinion is more relevant than ever and the areas where we are really unsurpassed is (1) historical data and (2) the most usable web site, the latter one I am a part of.

Lots of them, for instance https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3708319.3733685

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06950 "Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology" is a recent preprint.

> there's obviously a certain threshold of users and activity that is hit where this becomes unfeasible

Not really. If 5 people can moderate 1000, surely 5000 can moderate 1 million. Divide et impera, it's not a new idea.

Just keep in mind that in a free market there is supposed to be no profit. If there is, then something is wrong. In this case the companies just don't feel like moderating and following laws.

I think a key facet of good moderation is that it doesn't have to be on content, specifically. Behavior is often more troublesome. We can smirk about "tone police," but it really can make a huge difference.

If you don’t think societies can be greedy, self serving, and short sighted I don’t know what to say.

We have raped this planet into a coma and our children will have to scrape together whatever remains when we are done.