Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
Gamification once promised to create a better society, but it’s now used mainly to addict people to apps. The gamifiers, like Skinner’s pigeons, prioritized immediate rewards over delayed ones, so they gamified for the next financial quarter and not for the future of civilization.
Gurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
Gotta say, it feels like we missed an opportunity to reinvent social. Can you tell them apart?
Challengers like Meta’s Threads don’t seem like drop-in replacements for Twitter — especially since Threads head Adam Mosseri keeps saying his team will not “encourage” news on the platform. That makes Threads a comparatively tamer experience than the chaos that drove Twitter to its height. “Threads is to Twitter as methadone is to heroin,” says... See more
Facebook inflated its video metrics, a bunch of digital media executives carelessly pivoted to video in the hopes that they would become essential content suppliers to Mark Zuckerberg, and then he imperiously killed them all because he realized it was far easier to negotiate with an infinite supply of individual burned-out Instagram influencers.... See more
Ritual is vital because it gives us a sense that we belong to the world. A sense of connectedness, whether to society, nature or the divine, is in turn linked to a sense of psychological wholeness and lower rates of mental illness.
Social media offers the opposite; connection without relatedness.
Alexander Beiner • Myth and Metrics: How Social Media Robs Us of Ritual, and How to Revive It
The Battle for Your Time: Exposing the Costs of Social Media | Dino Ambrosi | TEDxLagunaBlancaSchool
youtube.com“Social media is free because you pay for it with your time.”
What we're seeing is an end of the race to the bottom.
What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet... See more
What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet... See more