Thread

1. paulajohnson · 1790610990 · focus · HN ↗

   Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....

   1. nekusar · 1790612689 · focus · HN ↗

      The problem is for-profit corporate social media.

      Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.

      Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.

      Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.

      Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

      But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.

      Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?

      1. BeetleB · 1790614746 · focus · HN ↗

         I didn't downvote, but I am having trouble connecting your comment to the one you're responding to.

         1. nekusar · 1790615281 · focus · HN ↗

            The whole social media and under-18 argument isn't a problem with all social media.

            Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.

            Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.

            To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.

            1. BeetleB · 1790615734 · focus · HN ↗

               It was bad for kids even in the BBS days.[1] The things you mentioned merely made it worse.

               Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.

               [1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.

      2. astrange · 1790615351 · focus · HN ↗

         > Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

         Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.

         1. pavo-etc · 1790647126 · focus · HN ↗

            I have been using Mastodon since 2019 across multiple instances. The things you are talking about happen very rarely in actual use, I've never once had a problem with any of them. The signal to noise ratio on mastodon is higher than any other competing platform I've used.
      3. opan · 1790615440 · focus · HN ↗

         I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.
      4. criddell · 1790622049 · focus · HN ↗

         The biggest node in the fediverse is run by Meta.
      5. breezybottom · 1790643663 · focus · HN ↗

         You're wrong. The mental harm of social media has nothing to do with any of that.

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