Pelontrix

I HAVE MANY RAGE

  • it/its, he/him, whatever's funny

20, probably has adhd.


xkeeper
@xkeeper

I have talked about this before (it is one of my frequent topics), but one of the biggest differences of social media versus traditional communities is that everyone's experience here is their own.

usually my comparison is web forums, but consider even discord chats; if you don't understand the concept of what's going on, you can typically scroll up. everyone in the server1 is going to see the same conversation. you can scroll up and see what other people have said, how the conversation go to that point. maybe you can even reply in-line and ask what's up, or message someone directly.

social media doesn't let that happen.

every person on a social media website sees their own feed. their own timeline. as much as people complain about "the algorithm", you get that here on cohost too -- the algorithm is just yourself. but it means nobody shares a reality. nobody else on the website is going to see exactly what you see, and you will never see exactly what other people see.

in a forum, a thread has a chronological list of posts in it. everyone sees the same posts2. everyone is operating in the same space, with the same people, in the same environment.

in a forum, in a discord chat, you can scroll up. you can see why people are using the tone they are, how they got to that point, what led up to it.

on social media, you can't. none of that works. you may see only half of an argument. you may see none of it. you may see all of it, or some of it, or some of it but out of order because it was reposted weird. and you'll never, ever be able to see all of it at will. it is, flatly, not possible.

so it's very, very easy to end up in a state where you have multiple groups of people, all shouting at one another, where nobody actually really knows what's going on or how we even got to this point, and sometimes without even knowing why people are shouting.

social media has a lot of toxic aspects to it. cohost has identified a few; the focus on numbers and "engagement", that sort of thing. but one thing neither they nor anyone else can do is fix this.

imagine going into a store and only seeing a quarter of the shelves and aisles. "where are all the tomatoes at!? what the fuck is this place?!" because the shelf you see is empty, while the shelves on the other side of the store -- that you can't see -- have them all. all the while, some people agree with you that they can't see tomatoes, and other people are staring at you like "why are you so mad? they're right here."

the usual disclaimer applies; this is not a "something needs to be done about it" or "cohost sucks in this particular way". I am just stating things, as they are. I am pointing to the sky and saying it is blue because of these reasons. it is not a challenge or debate.

1: restricted channels change this but not in a meaningful way

2: some forums implement blocks, but this is again something you have to explicitly do and it usually leaves very obvious marks where things are missing


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in reply to @xkeeper's post:

Yeah, I'm learning more and more that I need that context in order to have a meaningful discussion and understanding about basically anything on this site, and it annoys the hell out of me how hard it is to find that context.

Like that whole "don't tell people to kill themselves" discourse we had a few months ago, too me that shit appeared out of nowhere and I had no idea why we were having that problem. I had to go looking for why people were getting upset at something that should be pretty obvious, and when I saw it was just someone (rightfully) overreacting to a crappy "conservatives should die" post and how Tumblr was banning it, only then did I discover that it was caused by 2 people I had followed and had somehow missed their posts complaining about it.

Shit like this is why I think I'm done with any SM in general, both because I need context in order to keep pace with anything going on, and because I'm starting to dislike the culture of this place (too many Furrys (nothing wrong with being one, I'm just whole heatedly not) and begging posts.)

i've written about it before because it keeps happening. another even more insidious version of this is when events happen like this:

  • A posts about A Thing That Is Bad.
  • B reposts A's post.
  • Other people talk about B and A's posts, sometimes without directly sharing the original.
  • A posts an update about Bad Thing and how it is No Longer Bad.
  • B's and other's posts continue spreading, even though the topic is no longer relevant

In a thread or chat room, anyone can say, wait a minute, we already covered this, here's what happened. But that can't happen on social media. It's built that way.

It's a very bad way to be, and I feel like a lot of people focus on the tangible aspects (metrics) over, you know, the underlying nature of it all.