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2021-07-26
Is it just me and the circles I hangout in, or have more and more people increasingly been noticing how harmful social media can be? Not only am I finding more videos, podcasts, news stories, and comments online on the topic, but it seems that I'm also running into more people in real life that are aware and outspoken about social media's negative effects.
The negative aspect of media platforms that most worries me is aggresive algorithmically curated feeds and recommendations. They fuel division and push people to either extreme of a given issue because that's what drives engagement -- the single metric most mainstream platforms care about. And because these algorithmic feeds are so personalized, users with different views and interests essentially live in their own separate realities with their own lens of facts and truth.
Now I'm not ready to go all doomsday guy on this yet. I'm optimistic that alarm bells are starting to go off and that we're seeing the beginning of a course correction. What I'm interested in is where we're going from here.
I've been active on Mastodon since the beginning of this year and as a platform it does a lot to promote healthy social media use. There is no algorithm to feed you content. Instead, feeds are purely chronological. If you want to make sure you don't miss someone's post, just follow them or enable notifications for them. Notifications are easy to customize allowing you to cut down on things you don't think are important. It has support for content warnings which allow people to hide sensitive or controversial content behind an extra click. Many clients allow you to hide statistics like numbers of favorites and followers. There are powerful mute controls that give you no excuse if you see content you don't want to see.
And Mastodon isn't that unique in any of this. Many other Fediverse platforms have the same or similar wellness features.
Could we see a meaningful shift to platforms like Mastodon? I think it's somewhat likely. If we do, it won't be because of decentralization, FOSS, or any of the features that tech people like to focus on. Instead it'll be because platforms like Mastodon, even though not perfect, are simply much healthier alternatives to the mainstream offerings.
I don't think the Twitters and Facebooks are going anywhere anytime soon. They're just too well established and have seemingly unlimited piles of cash.
What I do believe is that these mainstream platforms will eventually have to make major changes to avoid bleeding users. Their current strategy of 'engagement above all else' isn't sustainable in the long run -- at some point the users will have had enough. I don't know what those changes will look like, but these well-established players have all proven to be very good at copying features from new up-and-comers. We'll hopefully at least see a bigger emphasis on wellness features, but I'll also have my fingers crossed that big changes are made to the algorithms or their transparency.
Whether we see the rise of new platforms or the improvement of established ones I don't believe matters too much. What does matter is that we learn what is and isn't healthy and I really think we're on the way to accomplishing that.
- moddedBear
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