Not that its a bad thing. I just wish that social media is held accountable for scams and bullying cuz they have the authority to do something about it.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

No, it's algorithms. They prioritise retention and everything else gets tossed onto that fire. Decency, mental health, reality, it doesn't matter. The machine will stochastically find every weakness in human psychology and exploit it.

And that is driven by business decisions. Facebook in Myanmar was the de facto internet because they'd subsidised it so they would have a monopoly. They knew that they needed to implement native language filters to deal with bigotry that was becoming rampant on the platform because their algorithm was finding that bigotry and amplifying it. But they noticed that when they turned on those filters, their revenue went down, so they disabled them. That decision is fairly credibly implicated in the genocide that followed.

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

Smartphones have been a disaster for the internet.

Barrier to entry is not a bad thing.