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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Lots of people want SM to just fall off the face of the earth, but they forget that nothing close to it has ever existed in human history. It's completely new and there will be and have been mistakes, from giant to small. There's no going back, only forwards, we need to learn and regulate as needed.
We learned that keeping it "free" for the end user leads to severe privacy implications as the service needs to make money not just for profit but just to keep things running and put out new features and fixes.
At it's core, SM gives the smallest of us (For better or for worse) a voice to the level that in the past was achievable only for the rich and the noble and interconnects us all globally better than anything that has ever come before it.
If we can learn to mitigate the bad parts I think SM will end up being a boon for humanity
Its not new, its just a different platform. Pub, forum, market, square, plaza, community hall, water cooler. Humans are fundamentally social animals and there have always been public forums were the community gathers to meet, chat, and share news and gossip. Those physical places have essentially all been wiped out in modern western countries now as it let's all people in an area gather and share ideas. That's really bad for capitalism and for our increasingly fascist governments. So they close the pubs, run roads the the forums and close the markers to build a new Walmart. Social media is there now to provide for the need but to do it in a a way that divides people instead of bringing them together, and controls what they see and hear so they stay compliant.
I think the idea of social media dividing us ignores the scale of it. All those other examples you gave were very local, and in that environment a consensus can form about certain political or ideological views. Those views could be vastly different than those a similar sized community holds 100 miles away though. Social media and it's global scale exposes those differences and makes consensus on any sort of issue impossible.
At the same time it also allows for minority solidarity outside of the traditional local community. For example there may only be 1 or 2 LGBT+ people in a town, which can easily be marginalized, shamed and ignored. But if they're able to communicate across geographic boundaries they're able to create a larger stronger community that is harder to ignore. It also does the same for nazis though.
"Gathering together and sharing ideas is bad for capitalism" care to explain that point further? I'm not really following.
Not the original commenter, but I'm going to go ahead and assume he meant that the forum has no place in the traditional 'bread and circuses' used to control masses.
Free exchange of ideas and healthy debate mostly yields good philosophies or slight enlightenment of people participating (and when they get back home they bring that with them and spread the enlightenment), though one should consider whether these romanticized versions of the pub and the forum are actually in line with reality. In order to have a good debate you need the right people and the right place.
I would assume that the base example would be workers gathering in a pub and thinking 'what if none of us works tomorrow? who's going to build their stuff?'. And some might not have even thought of that before. And this leads to unionizing.
Contrast that with a platform like facebook that channels you into a place where you find what you already know and think you want via algorithm, and thus are basically shielded from knowing stuff you don't already. Knowledge is power and all that. Sure, the forums and pubs are fairly easy to poison, but it takes more effort.