missingstring @ missingstring @retrolemmy.com Posts 0Comments 2Joined 1 wk. ago
Yeah. So much of our social media is structured to reinforce being combative. Even the upvote/downvote feature of Reddit/Lemmy etc has this effect of rewarding performativity over substance. People start competing for points and start to interpret high point totals as the equivalent of winning an argument or saying something of substance.
Since it’s a lot easier to get upvotes if you’re pithy or snarky or unserious the whole mechanism that underpins this tech tilts people toward simplistic and aggressive rhetoric.
I don’t want to get too “the medium is the message” here and complexity in political discussions (or any discussions really) have been decreasing generation over generation - so it’s not just a social media problem. But social media seems to have broken so many of the traditional guardrails we’ve had against demagoguery. It’s going to take a lot to unwind it.
Hahah. Yeah same. Obviously the fediverse needs to be more user friendly to gain traction, but I’m having a lot of fun with the more… technical(?)… knowledge required to wrap your head around it.
The Fediverse feels much more like the old internet.