In your opinion which one made you noticed people mindset getting dumber, superficial, vain, zombie-like or worst?
- TikTok
- Snapchat
Either The Epstein list or Truth social
We say usually say Tiktok has ruined peoples mental health/politics, but I find facebook and twitter abhorent.
It’s not clear people are any dumber. People have always been dumb, and “everyone’s getting dumber” has always been a popular take - it used to be about too much TV; much earlier Plato blamed poetry.
I do see it wrecking people’s mental health and burning up their time and money. And that’s not even getting into how much power we’ve handed these companies over our devices and personal information in the process.
YouTube for me. I just realized I’ve been experiencing brain-rot like symptoms (i.e. unable to concentrate, think deeply in realtime, continue conversations without much pre-thinking) for the past few years because I watch too much Lets Plays as a substitute for human interaction.
Stack overflow gave me an insult fetish :3
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Tiktok, since it has made young people totally addicted to it. Most likely ruined many early brains so people cant live without constant dopamine hits. And probably ruined many school grades and future careers as well.
Its an escape from the world that is so shitty that people need mental relief from it.
It’s crazy to me that there is a whole generation (not only, even tiktok people my age) lost the attention span to watch a movie anymore. Watching a movie used to be peak entertainment, you’d plan it in advance and hang out with friends. I had a date some time ago and she told me she would beowse tiktok when nothing happens in the movie, she claimed that she can multitask really well. we watched a tv show and she was more browsing than watching. Every now and then she would look up and wait until something funny or possibly important happened, laughed or repeated it, just to look back at the phone. I told her that we can do something else if she wanted, but she still claimed it’s fine, she can do both. We watched the same episode 2 1/2 times, and she never realised.
Yep their brains need constant dopamine. Ive also noticed in new movies how they often start with a huge action sequence to get the viewer interested, and frequently keeps throwing silly action scenes in all the time.
You can compare this with movies from the 80s and 90s that are much slower but actually have genuine characters that are very likeable instead.
I think most of them have all done severe damage but in different flavors, perhaps with a little overlap between flavors. TikTok creates stupidity/zombiemind/brainwashed. Twitter creates fascists. Facebook creates idiots. Instagram creates egomaniacs and narcissists. Reddit is all over the place because it’s a collection of different sub-platforms.
Twitter/Bluesky/Threads/Mastodon
Twitter and it’s imitations have taught us quote-dunking, by extension the idea that online debates are productive, and the idea that nuance is a waste of words. Outside of that it’s just algorithmic curation in general that’s damaging so all the other sites are equal.
Why you lumping Mastodon in with that lot? 🥺
Same system. Just because it’s more moral on the backend doesn’t mean it escapes the concept of twitter arguments and filter bubbles.
I think it’s pretty arguable that it does.
Not being algorithmically driven, the absence of an incentive for incendiary content goes a lot way to change the tone of the spaces.
Not to mention all the other ways the platform is operationally different from these other for profit platforms.
Have to agree. And this is pervasive enough that lazy articles about tweets are now a major percentage of online “news”. So-and-so destroys x-and-such on Twitter!" So what? It doesn’t change anything or anyone’s mind.
Pretty sure facebook has been instrumental in at least one ethnic cleansing, so yeah that one
The one in Myanmar, right?
I would say they are all equally bad… But Facebook should take the crown: Cambridge Analytica
Facebook
Facebook killed family members. No really, COVID got them and they didnt recover. They got all their news from Facebook. Not from anything close to official. Facebook was all they were on 24x7. That and Fox news. It was sad but what can you do? Its the new Darwin award and Facebook facilitated it.
I wouldn’t mind the flood of spam, right-wing nonsense, and guesstimated content in the browsing streams quite so much if I at least there was a useful bias for seeing what people on my friends’ & subscribed lists were posting, but NOOoooo… (cue John Belushi)
At this point they’ve hilariously turned their own product in to something that doesn’t hold even the slightest bit of value for me, anymore. I really need to send Zuck a nice gift-basket of elephant dung for doing me that helpful favor. 😊
It’s hard to compare between platforms because of how they cater to different audiences, but if we’re going off sheer numerical scale towards social unrest, Facebook is the clear frontrunner.
The main reason is Facebook Zero, the program established to provide access to the platform in developing and under resourced nations at no costs to the users (with some exceptions), leading to billions of users around the world to view Facebook as “The internet” ™.
Wikipedia link to Facebook Zero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
Criticism of Facebook Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
Anything that encourages the sharing of small snippets of information, elevates the prominence of misinformation thanks to engagement algorithms and reduces discourse to simple 3 word responses have caused the most damage.
So facebook/instagram/tiktok/twitter.
Reddit wouldn’t count in my view. It encourages lengthier, more critical responses. Yes its an echo chamber in places but its also pretty easy to avoid toxic content.
Twitter ruined people’s image of reality. The echo chamber, the content generated for follower counts, the view that the perspectives on Twitter somehow represented what the mainstream population was concerned with, the entitlement that stemmed from each individual thinking they had and deserved a megaphone, the dumbing down of thoughts to meet character limits; that platform was severely detrimental to American society. In my opinion, these issues are far worse than the brain rot, vapid influencer schtick, and right wing radicalization the others generated.
Brain rots REALLY bad but yes twitters character limit alone was a instant decline in dialogue and commentary. I’ve honestly never used it to see an internal representation of how it’s doing damage mentally. So thanks for the insight with this comment
The fact that Xwitter became such an echo chamber and that people there really started to believe that they were the moral compasses of humanity made it gain the appropriate nickname, here in Brazil, of “Black (in the sense of rotten) Banana Institute”.
