
Was Social Media a Mistake? - mkempe
http://tracinskiletter.com/2018/03/16/was-social-media-a-mistake/
======
ddingus
Not at all.

Someone was going to do it.

The mistakes are:

Failure to educate people better on the dynamics of speech. The idea of,"right
to not be offended", comes to mind. We don't have a shield in the First
Amendment for good reason.

Agency in conversation. We control our end of things, and we control our
responses too.

So often the goto is righteous indignation. So many other tools are available.
Humor, disregard, honest engagement... A lot gets escalated way too easily.
Very favorable risk reward ratios result in mega drama, lots of butthurt.

Doesn't have to be that way.

Weighting of things isn't done well in a lot of cases too. A clown gets at us,
and we allow that, instead of calling the laughable as such?

Norms. Social media could be used more to understand others better. For those
who embrace doing this, it's pretty awesome. Perspective is out there. A world
of it for the asking. Near free... such an opportunity wasted.

Had the software come with better norms, the hard work in all this, our social
media problems would be much less, maybe non problems.

The biggest, in terms of "fake news", seems to be the idea of conflating
opinion and advocacy into "news", now a bludgeon. Evaluating these things is
part of the cost of being connected.

People are ill equipped, and often appear to have some expectation of there
being trusted, work free, sources that they can count on.

Those don't really exist. For profit news, and the education problem I first
mentioned, combine to render many people, too many people, victims of some
kind, rather than critically minded enough to navigate things.

Technical solutions have their place, but also costs. One being dissent all to
easily marginalized as toxic, propaganda, fake, whatever flavor of the day is.

Most of the problems are human ones. It's gonna take a generation or two for
new, better norms, education (when we start digging deep on that one), to take
root and begin to turn things around.

I just hope we don't lose frank, real expression, citizen reporting, advocacy
and other vital things along the way there.

At times, I feel a Disneyland type Internet is our doom.

Hate the thought of all that. I've met and interacted with awesome people, had
some of the best, raw, real conversations ever online, and the idea of it all
being rendered safe?

No pain, no gain kids.

