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At one point I really, truly believed that the internet and social media would be a turning point in human interconnectivity and cultural understanding. The ability to just... talk to someone on the other side of the planet, at will? When we know that exposure to other beliefs and cultures is superb at punching holes in hatred and misunderstanding? Surely this would lead to great things!
Yeah, that was a miss.
Exposure to other is still a fantastic way to grow understanding. But the internet and social media were not a highway to it, and as the "wild west" era of the internet faded and we instead got corporate-governed, algorithm-driven siloization of views, my views on the value of social media changed sharply.
I agree. Though, I think it was less a case of a misguided or overly optimistic view, and more a case of unfettered capitalism driving the Internet into an ideological cesspool. Everything on the internet tends to get a lot shittier once people start making money off of it.
Yes and no. I think I was overly optimistic that people would make use of the possibilities of social media. I have thoughts on why I was mistaken, but ultimately I failed to recognize that a lot of people like their views affirmed and will seek out circles which do so.
At the same time, you're 100% right: Companies saw an opportunity to drive engagement and reap huge profits with the teeeeensy little side effects of further siloizing viewpoints, distorting reality, and elevating the most extreme positions. It turbocharged everything awful and repeatedly turned sites into cancerous shitholes.
I think all the inter-instance drama on Lemmy shows pretty well that people don't need money to enter filter bubbles. I don't think you can even see this comment lol
For some reason, you made me think of 4chan and how it's always been a cesspool, no capitalism needed. Little did we know how most corporate social media would devolve into "4chan, but with ad-friendly moderation"
You weren't wrong on that. You just didn't realize that most people really suck, and sucky people being able to connect easily results in gestures widely.
I remember when scrolling through Facebook, all I saw was updates on my friends and family and pages I chose to follow. Now my feed is full of random posts from pages I didn't ask to see posts from but the algorithm decided I should.