Social Media Discussion

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  • Ramanisky24

    Awww ... sad day for Bingo Bongo

  • trooperbill0

    the issue is audience profiling and content targeting that creates a self reinforcing echo chamber that drives people more and more to the left/right

  • grafician2

    Think this thread is very relevant here:

    "the influence of social media has created a perspective in artists that they need to produce masterful quality works in a large enough quantity so that they can be shared on an almost daily basis. this is an impossible standard that forces artists to create uninspired work. (1/-)

    issues resulting in lack of depth, emotion, personality, and sincerity in the production of visual works arise. if visual art is not captivating enough on a first glance, a 'like' will not be granted from the audience, and the digital work will die. (2/-)

    this impossible turn around time on production results in a disconnection between the artist and their work, and largely the work from the audience. growth is measured in numbers on a large scale, without likes/retweets/follows, the artist has missed their mark and failed. (3/-)

    art is a visual language that exists only in sincerity of expression - visual art digested by audiences through social media platforms perpetuates the belief that trends are art, and in turn destroying the integrity of sincerity. artistry is lost, propaganda is created. (4/-)

    who is the critic? in this climate, artist's works are viewed almost exclusively by other artists. when a post is created, its fate is largely decided by a small group of users within the first 10 minutes. fresh artists can not grow without a hand from seasoned artists. (5/-)

    this being the case, an artist must play the game or die. influence is taken from larger accounts, silencing fresh voices and keeping aesthetics of visual art on trend with what works in the world of social media. break the trend and risk engagement. a circle is created. (6/-)

    vis art is now broken into subcultures defined by a larger community. an artists on 'photo twitter' must exist in a bubble. if aesthetics are not on par with what is produced by the majority, engagement is lost if there isn't a fresh sense of ingenuity in the field. (7/-)

    cliques are created in the forms of group chats. this is correlated simply by lunch tables in middle school - each subculture existing in their own bubble. artists are granted entry by clout or aesthetics, with there rarely ever being an in between. (8/-)

    this creates a toxic state of being for the mind set of a visual artist on social platforms. to succeed in this culture without creating one's own cult following, an artist must befriend users in their field or risk losing their chance at accumulating 'clout'. (9/-)

    at what cost would you risk losing an active voice of sincerity in your works? this post exists for no other purpose than to state observations made in my current length of stay on social media. (10/10)

    addition: i’d like to note that i’ve read every comment posted and am responding to all private messages - hearing personal experiences is insightful and invaluable to me, as well as conversing about other perspectives than what i have written in this thread."

    https://twitter.com/fatherrich_/…

    • artists need to find the discipline to know when work is done. I don't know any artists who produce great work every day. it is not possibledkoblesky
    • success defined by number of followers....is a concept that needs to be broken. It is like defining yourself by money....it will make you crazydkoblesky
    • ^yeah ikr but this is very real today, unless you post constantly and in specific expected terms, you don't exist on social media it seems these daysgrafician
    • and sure, having a pretty face, a nice ass, some huge...ahem "personality" is a must too

      what a pathetic state of things...
      grafician
  • mort_17

    I have a friend who, unlike me, doesn’t think Trump did a bad job, is strongly anti-vaccine, thinks spinach can cure cancer and supports every conspiracy theory going. He’s a good person. But for whatever reasons, that’s his leaning.

    When I used to have a Facebook account, I felt the need to push back on his posts and opinions, especially when they got a tonne of likes and responses. I generally tried not to get involved but was triggered enough to avoid him in real life.

    Since not having a Facebook account (a few years now), we meet up, speak on the phone and I enjoy his company. These things come up sometimes but it’s a much more nuanced discussion and I tend to respond more compassionately. I also steer the conversation more towards topics where we have common interest. Music, movies etc.

    My point is, social media, forums, instant messaging, news feed algorithms, etc. set us up for polarisation. We have huge capacity for empathy, understanding and connectedness but these platforms, often take us in the opposite direction.

    For me, largely avoiding them works.

    • Agreed. I don’t mind the platforms themselves as much as the algorithms that trap people in feed tunnels w/o their real understanding that tunnel is a sewerinstrmntl
    • Nice analogy. I think there's also a more basic issue of not being able to convey nuance with text on a screen. Emojis are a poor substitute for body language.mort_
    • So much is communicated non-verbally in person.mort_
    • good point mort!renderedred
    • I'm worried that my friends still believe that Trump said to drink bleach to fight the corona virus and other hoaxes. This is not good.stewart
    • He suggested injecting it, right?

      https://www.snopes.c…
      mort_
    • My neighbor said “no matter how it works out, I hope it’s for the better.”jtb26
    • Amen @mort_. No one talks about the weather on social(s).

      It's all polarizing like you said, especially now in 2021.
      ideaist
    • @stewart, why? Those people are mocking the shit response, science denial and utter stupidity of the president. They aren't the problem.monospaced
    • Completely agree. Thanks for being smart, sane, and compassionate in an online world that's rarely any of those things.MondoMorphic
    • This is correct but at some point you got to judge someone's intelligence if they believe whatever graphic comes across their screen but despise the NY Times.omahadesigns
    • That’s why it is frustrating to see so much “social media news” on here. The purveyors just say it’s because QBN needs more content.toemaas
    • Public officials shouldn't be on social media at all. They've got official channels.neverscared
    • I have a few very far right friends. I like them, despise some of their beliefs. Hope they can see a better way somehow.noRGB
  • sted1

    The generation behind us (1st and 2nd gen internet user) is much more honest and open.
    Does not cares what detail they give up because they don't have anything to regret.

    • morals and ethics have no meaning to them. is that a good thing or not? i ask myself frequently.renderedred
    • I wonder if Parler users thought they were on the dark web.DRIFTMONKEY
    • "dumbfucks"grafician
  • utopian2

    Facebook and Twitter are finally both self destructing, they have created the monster and now its eating itself. They've collectively been ripping apart the social fabric of how society works and are responsible for destroying society one tweet/post at a time.

    • yes.renderedred
    • Fb could die and it is, slowly, but twitter is the thing - tw is more relevant, THE public squaregrafician
    • I don't agree with this. I think that is exactly the kind of mirror that humanity needs. So that we can get rid of lying hypocritical people forever.sted
    • I always bring in the catholic church into this argument and the hundreds of years of its good deeds.sted
    • Like how they kept people in the dark, spread misinformation, and get involved in politics by manipulating the masses.sted
    • fb is already imploding in my view, twitter is on its way.renderedred
  • dkoblesky0

    Everyone wants to make social media this bad thing that, if we just didn't have it, well these problems we have would not really be so bad

    Social media is just a dumb piece of software. It may show you specific things based on who you are, but so does television, so does print, so do the billboards you drive by...of course in different ways.

    No one forces you to act because of the way these tools make suggestions for you. You still have free will.

    People who are dumb enough to believe Qanon would probably have believed it anyway. Plenty of cults happened without social media. I mean the Elders if Zion shit has been around forever.

    I am not saying that the new ways social media work are not worth analyzing. And Facebook is so big that it probably should be regulated by government...or something like that

    But it is too simplistic to just say 'Facebook, ie Social Media.,,,bad'

    Is QBN bad? I like QBN...and get something out of it....but I am strong enough not to click the NSFW thread just because it is there

    • Facebook quite literally fuels the fire to this shit.section_014
    • Social media from the start...has always brought the worst out in people i.e. trolls, hatred, jealousy, ego, self-importance, propaganda, etc..utopian
    • Does QBN qualify as social media with a 100 users?utopian
    • maybe social media also brings out the good in people...?dkoblesky
  • GuyFawkes12

    Censorship "works for us" when its Trump.
    But censoring Bernie 4 years ago is also what gave us Trump.

    • I dunno how true this really is. Yes some working class people voted for Trump but the only income group he won was $100k+yuekit
    • Trump was only censored for his lies and danger. Bernie was just ignored.monospaced
    • lol okGuyFawkes
    • Trump wasn’t censored either.monospaced
    • So banning trump isnt censoring him. Ok dude.GuyFawkes
    • Read your last 2 comments back and ask yourself if anyone should take your words seriously.GuyFawkes
    • Thats the problem with know it allsGuyFawkes
    • If you look at who Trump supporters are they are mostly extremely partisan conservatives. People who read Breitbart and stuff like that.yuekit
    • The crossover with Bernie supporters was never that significant. You weren’t going to appease the Trump people by giving them universal healthcare, in factyuekit
    • most of them would be out of the streets protesting this as a communist takeover. Which is not to say the needs of the working class in the USA haven’t beenyuekit
    • neglected by the ruling class, just that you can’t draw such a clear line between these things.yuekit
    • Kicking him off social media is not censorship.monospaced
  • GuyFawkes17

    • I think there may have been educational value in those books.PhanLo
    • Erotic harry potter fanficscarabin
    • There go all the non-criminal offenses.stewart
  • _niko5

    Do we consider QBN social media?

    we post all kinds of shit, some extremely distasteful some extremely useful, the good far outweighs the bad, and members that get out of line get booted and I think for the most part justifiably so.

    I don't think QBN should suffer because of the thoughts or actions of a few.

  • i_monk-8

    Letting just any idiot have an equal platform is obviously a mistake.

    • I disagree. I think it’s the beauty of the whole thing. No, it’s the entire point of it. Sorry man.monospaced
    • The beauty of disinfo, mass manipulation, cancel culture, conspiracy theories, and fomenting anti-democratic coups. "Sorry man." Lol.i_monk
    • More and more I find myself agreeing with mono, respect.IRNlun6
    • Social media is a tool mono, careful not to conflate it with free speech. Just because you CAN say anything doesn't mean you're owed a microphone.ben_
    • One mans idiot is another mans philosopher.Chimp
  • NBQ003

    This guy is getting a bit annoying and smart-assy lately but there’s a bit of truth in it.

    • He’s kind of a teumptard.monospaced
    • yeah this guy's annoying.
      free speech is: our government sucks
      not: let's say all kinds of bullshit to inspire violence and put people in danger
      _niko
    • also, you making money on youtube shouldn't be equated to free speech ie I can say whatever ludicrous thing i can think of as long as people watch my shit_niko
    • ...especially when what you say puts people's health or lives in danger._niko
    • nothing said directly puts health and lives in danger. everyone is responsible for their own actions.cannonball1978
    • also no free speech is govt stuff plus everything elsecannonball1978
    • omg. what happened to aphex twin?sandpipe
    • "You still think?"Chimp
  • NBQ000

    Amazon Is Booting Parler Off Of Its Web Hosting Service: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/art…

    Getting a bit ridiculous.

    • Ridiculous why? 4 people are dead from an attempted coup. In the USA. Think about that.inteliboy
    • Almost at 400k dead from COVID due to misinformation.inteliboy
    • This is not about hurt feelings and politics, but protecting human life and keeping a democratic society from falling apart.inteliboy
    • Parler is just a service. Like twitter. Look how many isis terrorists were or still are on twitter and twitter didn’t get pulled off the web.NBQ00
    • the only thing i'd say about parler is its sole existence is to provide a sounding board. right wing fascist conspiratory lunatics._niko
    • so we saw tons of nazis on tv as kids, tons of KKK members on tv, talk shows etc but there was never the Nazi network or White power channel or KKK TV_niko
    • all this cleaning house does is remind me of communist era purges.renderedred
    • yeah, sure, there are also other bad people still on twitter. why is this even an argument?inteliboy
    • like a 5 year old going "yeah but...!"inteliboy
    • These companies don't want to be associated. Makes sense to me.dbloc
  • Bluejam1
  • colin_s0

    I posted about Marshall McLuhan not too long ago, mostly because I think it's easier to understand the modern world by way of his thoughts.

    While he talked a lot about mediums and their messages, I think social media has to do more with his theories regarding news and publishing in America.

    Basically, advertising in America is good news. It can be kind of a lie, but it is what is new and it is always a good thing. The balance to this in media is naturally bad news - so thus in the world of broadcast and publishing, often the news is bad to offset the goodness found in the solutions of consumerism.

    When we get to social media - where now people and not stories become the products - the natural evolution is people take the form of the news or the advertisements. You can see this in TikTok now, or earlier social networks before they were massive and corporate, where people are putting opinions or messaging into their content. They are serving as an ad to the world - like videos where it's something funny or cute and then someone warns about global warming.

    Social media is an active work in progress by people against a controlled and overzealous form of oppression in the institutional media sphere. However, the more media companies are just bought up by monopolies, the more extreme all of this is going to get in terms of searching for someone that will just tell the truth and not sell out about it.

    I dunno, people talk about Facebook like it's this pillar, but that shit is only ten years old. You can bet if it wasn't propped up by Wall Street investors who don't want to lose a fuck ton of money, it would be long since abandoned. It's like a hot potato, or Sears in 1997.

    • aka, like everything, right now larger structures and their finances are the issue. this will all be chaos until the bigger problems are dealt with.colin_s
    • and we're slowly becoming robots, or likely less humanist, in the process.colin_s
    • we talk about Facebook as the first mass self-marketing tool in the user contributed content era of the internets.sted
    • “Advertising is good news” lolol wtf nonsensenb
    • Makes perfect sense to me. It's all happy people and aspirational lifestyles. Never child molesters and school shootings.monNom
  • Gnash5

  • Fax_Benson2

    All elected politicians should have their accounts frozen for the duration of their time in office. He's probably the worst offender but the problem goes way beyond Trump. We were fucked as soon as politics moved onto Twitter and political journalism followed. Remove all of the politicians. Platforms could genuinely claim to be impartial and be absolved of the responsibility of having to police them.

    • there should also be some recognition of the fact that users supply all of the monetised content for free and should be paid somehow, maybe as a taxFax_Benson
    • fyi Facebook gets $2 value from each user nowgrafician
    • < see, if we do regulation this way everything will be fine.sted
  • NBQ007

    “Guess who can still tweet, motherfu...”

    • <3jtb26
    • sums up his entire Presidencyface_melter
    • how do, face? That his wife made sure he didn’t act a fool online and instead was a good father and leader? Sure.monospaced
    • He sat on his arse for eight years and did pretty much fuck all.face_melter
  • jtb262

    It’s not giving people a platform that’s the problem. It’s when the social media platform becomes too powerful. When nation states are able to exploit social platforms to destabilize an entire country, that’s too big.

    The simple answer is that tech must be broken up so that free markets can keep them from becoming exploitable vulnerabilities. If there’s competition of platforms it will be harder to misinform masses. Likewise it will be harder amass a trove of data that makes technocrats gods. You won’t here Trump acolytes fight that.

    Further we must evolve from the defensive posture of fighting for data privacy and instead invent and regulate new means of data ownership. I suggest modernizing copyright and patent law.

    Amazon has to break up it’s data and consumer products.

    Alphabet must be broken apart.

    Facebook should be separated from Instagram and what’s app.

    • Fb is a nation state itself. It captures a large % of all human speech. That’s problematic, and Zucks ego is too.jtb26
    • Disagreed. Breaking up all USA's big tech companies would be a mess and push investment in tech offshore.inteliboy
    • Mergers should be held under far more scrutiny though. The fact that Facebook ate up instagram so easily was a joke.inteliboy
    • You could be right. They should all be more heavily regulated and fined fbybthe FTC at minimum for some of the behavior. It happened to MS and they’ve been finejtb26
  • grafician0

    It's like this because nobody bothered to write a "manual for the Internet" and everybody is doing whatever they like/want rn - users and companies alike

    WWW means more Wild Wild West than Web

    but overall social media is a looking glass for society more or less, so when we achieve online nirvana, will practically transform our offline society too; rn we're in the "reverse zone" as in anonymous people are worse online than offline - I mean even QBN is a good slice of that (just like now with Trump, QBN tolerated many years the likes of bobo and others like that); so when we learn to behave online, we'll be good offline too.

    solutions: more education ofc and even re-education for some

    • re-education as in "look, this is how this actually works and this is how you use it"grafician
    • i also think education has to play partrenderedred
    • we have racists offline to begin with for examplerenderedred