In your opinion which one made you noticed people mindset getting dumber, superficial, vain, zombie-like or worst?
- TikTok
- Snapchat
Twitter/Bluesky/Threads/Mastodon
Twitter and it’s imitations have taught us quote-dunking, by extension the idea that online debates are productive, and the idea that nuance is a waste of words. Outside of that it’s just algorithmic curation in general that’s damaging so all the other sites are equal.
Have to agree. And this is pervasive enough that lazy articles about tweets are now a major percentage of online “news”. So-and-so destroys x-and-such on Twitter!" So what? It doesn’t change anything or anyone’s mind.
The telephone
I would say they are all equally bad… But Facebook should take the crown: Cambridge Analytica
instagram , i hope all their servers blow up
Pretty sure facebook has been instrumental in at least one ethnic cleansing, so yeah that one
The one in Myanmar, right?
Anything that encourages the sharing of small snippets of information, elevates the prominence of misinformation thanks to engagement algorithms and reduces discourse to simple 3 word responses have caused the most damage.
So facebook/instagram/tiktok/twitter.
Reddit wouldn’t count in my view. It encourages lengthier, more critical responses. Yes its an echo chamber in places but its also pretty easy to avoid toxic content.
Facebook
Facebook killed family members. No really, COVID got them and they didnt recover. They got all their news from Facebook. Not from anything close to official. Facebook was all they were on 24x7. That and Fox news. It was sad but what can you do? Its the new Darwin award and Facebook facilitated it.
I wouldn’t mind the flood of spam, right-wing nonsense, and guesstimated content in the browsing streams quite so much if I at least there was a useful bias for seeing what people on my friends’ & subscribed lists were posting, but NOOoooo… (cue John Belushi)
At this point they’ve hilariously turned their own product in to something that doesn’t hold even the slightest bit of value for me, anymore. I really need to send Zuck a nice gift-basket of elephant dung for doing me that helpful favor. 😊
It’s hard to compare between platforms because of how they cater to different audiences, but if we’re going off sheer numerical scale towards social unrest, Facebook is the clear frontrunner.
The main reason is Facebook Zero, the program established to provide access to the platform in developing and under resourced nations at no costs to the users (with some exceptions), leading to billions of users around the world to view Facebook as “The internet” ™.
Wikipedia link to Facebook Zero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
Criticism of Facebook Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
League of Legends
Tiktok easily.
All of them.
If there was a way to enable “see verified accounts only”, and “verified” actually meant using a system of legal identity verification in each territory, I would.
By how accounts talk on social networks, I struggle to see more than 5% actually coming from real people. The alternative, that people really are this uneducated, fooled, mean and angry, is just too horrible to bear. I have to believe it’s discord bots destroying our democracy, not actual people. It is, right? Right?!
Reddit. Otherwise we wouldn’t enjoy using a website with its exact mechanics. We are warped. You see the upvotes and downvotes spreading to all kinds of sites. Lesswrong (nucleus of Hitlerian AI cult insanity) wasn’t satisfied and has two forms of upvotes and downvotes. Every site that implements them agrees the voting is meaningless or not to be taken seriously, but they make it their main aggregation tool.
Twitter ruined people’s image of reality. The echo chamber, the content generated for follower counts, the view that the perspectives on Twitter somehow represented what the mainstream population was concerned with, the entitlement that stemmed from each individual thinking they had and deserved a megaphone, the dumbing down of thoughts to meet character limits; that platform was severely detrimental to American society. In my opinion, these issues are far worse than the brain rot, vapid influencer schtick, and right wing radicalization the others generated.
The fact that Xwitter became such an echo chamber and that people there really started to believe that they were the moral compasses of humanity made it gain the appropriate nickname, here in Brazil, of “Black (in the sense of rotten) Banana Institute”.
Brain rots REALLY bad but yes twitters character limit alone was a instant decline in dialogue and commentary. I’ve honestly never used it to see an internal representation of how it’s doing damage mentally. So thanks for the insight with this comment
BTW my answer was Instagram but tiktok came to take the crown
My gripe with Instagram is how it’s become a de-facto way of “staying in touch” with acquaintances and old colleagues
Not in my circles, thankfully. Yuck.
