This is touching on something very important but I feel there's a lot more to it. There's a lot of mystery around this for me. Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?
I think there's two major drivers here - scarcity of attention (1) and social distance (2).
1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead of long conversational openings and explorations of topics. Those require a lot of social trust-building and responding to feedback when you do them IRL, which is difficult on social media because...
2) Other people on social media just feel less real than those you encounter in real life, because you can't feel that bad feeling in your gut as strongly when you upset them, or the good feeling when you make them laugh. That same social distancing means you have a much easier time either idealizing them in that parasocial influencer-guru follower style, or feeling comfortable with being very harsh and combative with them. AKA the toxic gamer lobby phenomena, where people say the most heinous things you've ever heard to eachother, all the while being mostly fairly ordinary kids and adults IRL.
Both of these are kind of inherently tied up in the way we are ordering more and more of our (para)social life, so it seems very difficult to escape.
To paraphrase a point somebody made about content generated by machines purely to tug on your attention - everything feels increasingly meaningless because you have a finite amount of attention, and more and more of the 'social' interactions that your brain deals with in a day ARE meaningless and intended solely to mine your attention and keep you scrolling on ads.
One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow such culture around us though.
I do think this is one pathway, and it has kind of been happening - we're seeing people increasingly stop participating 'open' social medias and retreating into more sequestered communities with fewer, but enduring participants that you get to know, and who are united around care for some topic but also talk about other stuff. Discord servers are probably the most prominent of these just now. They have more in common with oldschool forums in the sense that you get to know the regulars, but are notoriously impenetrable if you're new and trying to search for information on some topic that's been covered in the past. But it's a start!
Now that Discord is apparently opening up to ads, it remains to be seen whether that cultural shift will be able to hold or if people are going to be driven into even deeper hidey holes, like the freed humans in The Matrix who have to hide out deep in the earth from all the robots ;)
I think another important aspect, another side of the same coin, of this is lack of boredom. If you're not bored you don't take as much initiative towards alternatives. It would be a simple problem if it was just about your own boredom but you have to convince your friends and those that would otherwise start stuff irl to be bored at the same time as well. And you can't coordinate properly because all coordination happens through the attention-stealing-machine.
> Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media.
You can't leave everything up to individual decision making or the results are collectively irrational. Notably, dieting and alcoholism are major problems we haven't had much success in addressing on a cultural level. Smoking is probably a better guide given how much rates have dropped in the last century.
It’s probably too late for most of us. Kind of like how anti-smoking education has pretty much killed smoking among the younger generations (until vaping came along) but it’s much more prevalent among the older cohort. Only a small fraction conclusively quit for the rest of their life, they mostly just die off.
We can lay down the foundation for such a culture for the future but it might be too late for most of us to right the ship.
I think it’s a way of farming status/clout. People who make fun of people who pose fringe ideas are rewarded with likes. People who shut down people on “the other side” are rewarded with likes. People can get likes by pushing the prominent ideology and kowtowing to that majority. It’s for their personal benefit, and being online removes the real-life downside of bullying or disagreeing with someone where you have to actually defend your ideas or deal with someone who is visibly upset by your actions. In conclusion, the upside of nitpicking is amplified by our tribal instincts, and the downside is muted by the nature of being online.
Social media is designed to make money, whether that be from selling data or conglomerating it and advertising to you. They want the user to be purely a consumer. They are designed to make people reactive and have a short attention span, they are easier to sell to.the users mental reward system is essentially brainwashed to be an easier target to sell to.
Even in a place like HN, you can't escape the behaviors and attitudes that people pick up in other social spaces online. If someone gets used to reading ill intent into a comment, they don't suddenly stop doing that because they are in a place where ill intent is less likely. Those social norms get carried with them from space to space. The toxicity is a contagion, even if this space isn't an incubator for it.
Advertising is one of the main reasons modern social media is experiencing continued enshittification in this era. Noam Chomsky in his "Manufacturing Consent" wrote of three "filters" that determined which content would be presented to viewers, and while he wrote on the mass media in 1988, I believe this framework applies equally to social media in 2024: access to capital; the "advertising license to do business;" and a symbiotic relationship with government, who provides access to authoritative sources of news.
Take X, for example: its access to capital allows it to eclipse most other social media and build network effects that are difficult for other startups to disrupt; after the Musk acquisition, advertisers began withdrawing from the platform; and as the Twitter files have claimed, its collusion with the U.S. government in the promotion/demotion of certain viewpoints.
If you want to see genuine viewpoints, you'd best seek out media that are largely independent of these three "filters" over what messages are permissible on the medium.
Being angry and negative is very much easier for most people than being happy and positive. I'm serious. It's easier to complain about the driver that cut you off as being an asshole driver than to ponder if they truly made a mistake and are feeling like shit right now. "Social" media capitalizes on this and multiplies it for the sake of engagement.
I believe the affinity of social media users to cast judgement is a huge factor as well, worse on those that actually do reflect a lot. Although it is perceived vastly more strongly that it is often meant since individual voices overlap. Still it furthers the assumption that many are very judgmental.
With that a strongly regulated social media place can be just as hostile as the most vulgar forum you can find. By experience, it can often be even worse.
Nit picking is a form of communication as well, perhaps often chosen because users want to share something difficult to do on the medium. That said, nit picking often doesn't carry hostility. Especially on tech platforms it is just meant as a contribution. Maybe there are carry over effects and miscommunication.
There are lots of replies; I'll add my theory. Threads aren't conducive to conversations that build psychological safety and trust. A natural conversation of curiosity/questions, in 1:1 or small group settings, doesn't exist. This leads to talking *at* each other instead of with each other. The reduction in empathy follows.
Thanks for asking the question and spawning the conversation threads!
Part of the problem lies here, and I'm doing it right now too.
In online public spaces we never have a conversation with another person, and rarely even then within a small group like enthusiast forums of yesteryear, we comment to the lynch mob. We reply to someone's statement with our own thoughts but it is not judged by the original poster if it was a good or insightful reply to what was originally said, it's judged by the mob with upvotes and downvotes and being flagged, misconstrued and nitpicked in fifty different ways. It happens here, Reddit, Facebook, YT, and any popular venue where comments are allowed. Even Github issues and pull requests.
I think it's why Discord is a popular alternative choice for many people. If you're not actively present, you can't chime in with your two cents and derail the conversation into some energy draining defense against someone's insane straw man attack. Comments needing to be in real time and the conversation being locked away and lost are a virtue for some folks.
One differentiation I find is that, I typically respond to questions or ask a question. In that way, I don't believe it was part of the problem, but demonstrated a pattern of improvement, I'd love to see (I responded to a direct question). More questions and dialog! :)
I think it's because when we get to know other people IRL what they say is of secondary importance to how we perceive their intentions and motives. These determine how we feel about a person. They're subjective and hard to ascertain on the basis of written text alone.
So as a matter of caution we tend to impute bad motives to people we can't 'feel' clearly which means any textual claims made are subject to unnaturally high levels of scrutiny and demands for evidence/documentation.
Also the internet is forever whilst IRL conversation is throwaway.
JMO, but an enormous part of it is this is the fundamental way teens now learn how to interact with the world. This disconnected, digital interface with other people that is rewarded at tremendous scale (popularity is now for some a worldwide deal...not just your high school).
Older folks like myself (GenX) learned the "classic" way...face to face. There were checks and balances. If you said something that skewed hostile you found out it could have immediate direct negative consequences. It could literally leave a mark.
Similarly if you went too far some other way...you found out immediately and directly how that could work out (we were just as cringy...we just didn't have it preserved digitally for prosperity).
Kids today (even writing that makes me wince) have less accountability for what they write than what we had to have for what we said. Also due to scale the effects are amplified. And also you are in a digital bubble that allows you to ignore anything that isn't positive. If you piss someone off by what you said so what? You'll never interact with them directly and there will be 1000s who agree w/ and encourage you.
> Kids today (even writing that makes me wince) have less accountability for what they write than what we had to have for what we said.
I think that's slightly different to what was said in GP:
> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
IOW, `kids these days` are required full corporate PR level accountability whenever and whatever they express, (and zero when cancelling others following social codes). There absolutely won't be thousands at your side unless you're in a straight up proper conspiracy theory circle full of actually schizophrenic people until the entire circle is going to be cancelled dead.
You can't label your opponent as belonging in a category and encourage making harmful gases in a toilet and get 127 upvotes. At least not anymore. Your comment will be deleted, and one below yours that explains why you're automatically doubly stupid will. You can't even say, literally orally voice, the word "die" in some parts of YouTube without algorithmic penalties. Saying "died of injury" can be a soft violation.
That is what GP is explaining by "you have [to] carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say", ironically the phenomenon I'm ending up being a contributing factor by typing this very comment, and part of what's making teens sick. I think it has to do with being correct being a cost and having huge unfortunate abuse potentials.
i don't think social media is inspiring people to act like this, i think the vast majority of people are just pricks in general and the internet lets them act like this without any negative consequences.
if there was some way to just start arguments about nothing in real life and then pause them at will to go and cherrypick stuff that supports your argument, then come back and act smug about it (or not come back at all if you don't find anything), people would incessantly do it in person too.
Social media created a perpetual church gossip culture where every action and statement is endlessly evaluated by the peanut gallery, while also creating a land rush for finding new moral angles to exploit for social status.
Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints.
It's sadly not just one thing that goes wrong. But at the base of it, it's the human faults at play. It's just being amplified by social media and the easy communication on Internet.
The advertising industry is fundamentally about intruding into your lives, and by that measure, the % of attention it can command.
The advertising industry (which is social media is that isn't colossally obvious) has relentlessly pursued increasing this percentage, and the smartphone was the physical means to achieve it, and newfound social addiction feedback loops the nitro turbo boost.
Even modern/new humans can't adapt to this. Older minds are crumbling into echo chambers, or withdrawing entirely. Paranoia takes hold.
Or is it paranoia? Or are your every move, thought, and action collected and categorized into a profile which is currently used simply for "advertising optimization", while in China it produces a worse-than-1984 dystopian system, and likely there are population profiling projects in US three letter agencies?
My internet profile is set in stone from my 20 years. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm purgeworthy whenever the totalitarianism grips the USA. Elections are becoming existential now, and that likely isn't paranoia.
While I've given a rational probability to all this, most people do not, they respond emotionally, especially to relentless stress and burden of processing unending perpetual advertising.
>Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?
So I'd like to point out something I've not seen mentioned yet. That is what I call 'small down behavior', that is nit picking on those that don't fall into some small group that is acceptable.
It seems that social media has not caused any new behaviors, but instead given a new and expansive venue for the behavior to spread.
I’d say a lot of that is genetic and or cultural. At the very least there are many of us who do not possess that instinct. We have much lower karma scores but we don’t care.
Just because you don't care about something doesn't mean it doesn't affect you.
For example with many websites, high karma posts/users show up at the top of the feed. This means those addicts messages are the ones you're getting subjected too every day.
> Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?
Social media is a highlight reel of people’s lives. It’s the best part hand-picked out of our mostly mundane lives.
Until these teenagers understand this, they’ll never feel “good enough” to share their own situation. Instead, they’ll remain on the hamster wheel trying to live up to the ideals peddled by influencers.
I think the reddit upvote downvote design is just one example of BAD UI that doesn't take into account the human element of the interface. Imagine if when you spoke with someone in real life, you added an upvote/downvote every sentence they said. This is why product designers need to be way more concerned with ethics than they are and companies need to give more respect to the product design role it is not just drawing pretty pictures you are shaping someones psyche.
