Technology

“Fixing” social media is like “fixing” capitalism. Any manmade system can be changed, destroyed, or rebuilt. It’s not an impossible task but will require a fundamental shift in the way we see/talk to/value each other as people.

The one thing I know for sure is that social media won’t ever improve if we all accept the narrative that it can’t be improved.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

-Ursula K Le Guin

Meta and twitter cease to exist tomorrow and 99% of the issues are solved IMO

The fediverse is social media and it doesn't have anything close to the same kinds of harmful patterns

The amount of comments thinking that Lemmy is totally not like a typical social media is absurd.

Guys, we only don't have major tracking of users here.That's it! Everything else is the fucking same shit you'd see on facebook. The moment Lemmy gets couple tens of millions of users, we gonna become 2nd facebook.

Social media isn’t broken. It’s working exactly how it was meant to. We just need to break free of it.

We're on the solution right now, lmao

Of course -corporate- social media can't be fixed ... it already works exactly they way they want it to...

I think just going back to internet forums circa early 2000s is probably a better way to engage honestly. They're still around, just not as "smartphone friendly" and doomscroll-enabled, due to the format.

I'm talking stuff like SomethingAwful, GaiaOnline, Fark, Newgrounds forum, GlockTalk, Slashdot, vBulletin etc.

These types of forums allowed you to discuss timely issues and news if you wanted. You could go a thousand miles deep on some bizarre subculture or stick to general discussion. They also had protomeme culture before that was a thing - aka "embedded image macros".

Uhm, I seem to recall that social media was actually pretty good in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The authors used AI models as the users. Could it be that their models have internalized the effects of the algorithms that fundamentally changed social media from what it used to be over a decade ago, and then be reproducing those effects in their experiments? Sounds like they're treating models as if they're humans, and they are not. Especially when it comes to changing behaviour based on changes in the environment, which is what they were testing by trying different algorithms and mitigation strategies.

Its performing as expected

I also noticed something in my friend group. No one makes anything. Its all share share share. Im the only one taking original photos or videos or making jokes. Its kind of sad. And is not like their lives are boring either. They'd just rather consume others stuff.

Are most people like that?

The study is based on having LLMs decide to amplify one of the top ten posts on their timeline or share a news headline. LLMs aren't people, and the authors have not convinced me that they will behave like people in this context.

The behavioral options are restricted to posting news headlines, reposting news headlines, or being passive. There's no option to create original content, and no interventions centered on discouraging reposting. Facebook has experimented with limits to reposting and found such limits discouraged the spread of divisive content and misinformation.

I mostly use social media to share pictures of birds. This contributes to some of the problems the source article discusses. It causes fragmentation; people who don't like bird photos won't follow me. It leads to disparity of influence; I think I have more followers than the average Mastodon account. I sometimes even amplify conflict.

I mean lemmy is pretty fucking neat, i love it here, no need to fix anything.

Social media was a mistake, tbh

No shit. Unless the Internet becomes democratised and publicly funded like other media in other countries like the BBC or France24, social media will always be toxic. They thrive in provocations and there are studies to prove it, and social media moguls know this. Hell, there are people who make a living triggering people to gain attention and maintain engagement, which leads to advertising revenue and promotions.

As long as profit motive exists, the social media as we know it can never truly be fixed.

Ofcourse not. The issue with social media are the people. Algorithms just bring out the worst in us but it didn't make us like that, we already were.

Neat.

Release the epstein files then burn it all down.

The original source is here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel method – generative social simulation – that embeds Large Language Models within Agent-Based Models to create socially rich synthetic platforms. We create a minimal platform where agents can post, repost, and follow others. We find that the resulting following-networks reproduce three well-documented dysfunctions: (1) partisan echo chambers; (2) concentrated influence among a small elite; and (3) the amplification of polarized voices – creating a “social media prism” that distorts political discourse. We test six proposed interventions, from chronological feeds to bridging algorithms, finding only modest improvements – and in some cases, worsened outcomes. These results suggest that core dysfunctions may be rooted in the feedback between reactive engagement and network growth, raising the possibility that meaningful reform will require rethinking the foundational dynamics of platform architecture.

Should just be people can't be fixed....

Pre print journalism fucking bugs me because the journalists themselves can't actually judge if anything is worth discussing so they just look for click bait shit.

This methodology to discover what interventions do in human environments seems particularly deranged to me though:

We address this question using a novel method – generative social simulation – that embeds Large Language Models within Agent-Based Models to create socially rich synthetic platforms.

LLM agents trained on social media dysfunction recreate it unfailingly. No shit. I understand they gave them personas to adopt as prompts, but prompts cannot and do not override training data. As we've seen multiple times over and over. LLMs fundamentally cannot maintain an identity from a prompt. They are context engines.

Particularly concerning sf the silo claims. LLMs riffing on a theme over extended interactions because the tokens keep coming up that way is expected behavior. LLMs are fundamentally incurious and even more prone to locking into one line of text than humans as the longer conversation reinforces it.

Determining the functionality of what the authors describe as a novel approach might be more warranted than making conclusions on it.

The article argues that extremist views and echo chambers are inherent in public social networks where everyone is trying to talk to everyone else. That includes Fediverse networks like Lemmy and Mastodon.

They argue for smaller, more intimate networks like group chats among friends. I agree with the notion, but I am not sure how someone can build these sorts of environments without just inviting a group of friends and making an echo chamber.

I'm not surprised. I am surprised that the researchers were surprised, though.

Bridging algorithms seem promising.

The results were far from encouraging. Only some interventions showed modest improvements. None were able to fully disrupt the fundamental mechanisms producing the dysfunctional effects. In fact, some interventions actually made the problems worse. For example, chronological ordering had the strongest effect on reducing attention inequality, but there was a tradeoff: It also intensified the amplification of extreme content. Bridging algorithms significantly weakened the link between partisanship and engagement and modestly improved viewpoint diversity, but it also increased attention inequality. Boosting viewpoint diversity had no significant impact at all.

Social spaces aren't something that needs fixing.

We blame the problems caused by wealth inequality on technology as a way to not even discuss making the rich contribute to society

Because how to use it is baked into what it is. Like many big tech products, it’s not just a tool but also a philosophy. To use it is also to see the world through its (digital) eyes.