The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
Exactly. The algorithm is literally designed to stop people from thinking about what they actually care about. Of course that has caused deterioration of every aspect of human society to some degree.
Truth. We need to massively regulate social media. If I had my way, I would prohibit any large social media site from offering any kind of content stream algorithmically targeted to a single user.
This wouldn’t be a restriction on speech. You could still have your website and publish whatever you wanted. You could still have sites where people can upload user content. But something like YouTube would look far different. YouTube could have one main page of content they show everyone, but they couldn’t have individual feeds for individual users. If you wanted to find content not on the main page, you would have to find it yourself. You would have to find channels, subscribe to them, share recommendations with friends, etc. If people want to create their own curated content feed, that’s fine. But they have to be the ones that do it.
We don’t even need to ban social media. What we need to completely ban is individually-targeted algorithmic content. That’s what’s lead us to the insanity we are currently experiencing. And this should apply to everyone, not just kids. If anything adults need this more than kids do.