Social media is a cancer and more people need to realize this. No amount of platforming will fix this. It’s designed to extract behavioral traits about you. It’s designed to spy on your shopping and browsing habits. It’s designed to build a model of you. Everyone fell right in.
The problem with social media is precisely the platform, it ranks what keeps people addicted, seeing more ads. Creators conform to the Algorithm and produce slop to capture some of that scarce attention. Nobody cares about users. Same shit happens on Google Search, YouTube, Amazon Search, Google Store, App Store... all platforms produce shitty feeds and search results. And before them we had TV and newspapers as slop making platforms.
Ahh yes, the “It’s always been this way” argument. I was wondering if it was going to show its ugly head.
The difference now is ANYONE can become a TV station. A newspaper. A radio talk show. While I’m all for allowing anyone to do anything, I’m also a fan of curation and quality over quantity. Social media has no value. Because it values nothing.
i dont see whats cancerous about social media conceptually. sharing photos online with a local network of contacts, setting up digital event flyers, instant messaging, etc ... yes these tools were used for subjectively nefarious purposes like cyberbullying, but on the whole they probably added more benefit than was subtracted from the community.
social media that has been gamified into an infinite scroll loop with the express intent to destroy attention spans and rebuild them around an advertising/behavioural structure of mark zuckerberg's ("they trust me ... dumb fucks") choosing? now yes that is cancer. but thats not really social media. theres nothing social about it.
i like the way someone put it here a few weeks back. we used to call these things social networks. then they became social media. so in that sense i do agree with you on a literal basis, although im not sure that was your intended point.
I've been saying this for a while. For all the talk about kids, seniors are the ones addicted to phones. Doomscrolling on Tiktok, Facebook, even locked into mobile games. Its very depressing.
I really wish iPhone/Android had better parental controls so I could monitor my dad's screen time and the type of content he was allowed to see on YouTube.
I see a lot of elderly people watching AI content on youtube shorts, one after another. The monotonic voice is a dead giveaway. Their feeds have optimized around it because they cannot tell the difference. Its sad.
I must admit. My parents we're right the whole time. Staring at the screen for a whole day is truly unhealthy and they should go to play outside instead.
Wider society spends an awful long time talking about the effects of social media on young people. I personally think that is somewhat blinkered because its an everybody issue. What do old people and kids have in common, lots and lots of free time. That's it. Same with unemployed, under employed people, people with no real interest or hobbies.
If there's a hole you need to fit and you do nothing with it, social media is the easy way out, and given that it does have addictive tendencies, we end up where we are.
This is something ive started to notice, the older generation becoming victims to doomscrolling, my dad being one of them. What makes it worst is that unlike kids who group in the social media world, and therefore have some ability of discerning between whats real and fake, the older gen are so gullible when it comes to fake news, propaganda, and ai generated content.
Not only that but they then go on to spread this false news among there whatsapp friends
"But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?"
False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.
Old people are wonderful relays from paid trolls and propaganda to their peers, unwittingly spreading and amplifying lies and political agenda in social media. They're often retired, having entire days at their disposal, wasting them on forwarding sh*t back and forth.
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> No amount of platforming will fix this.
The problem with social media is precisely the platform, it ranks what keeps people addicted, seeing more ads. Creators conform to the Algorithm and produce slop to capture some of that scarce attention. Nobody cares about users. Same shit happens on Google Search, YouTube, Amazon Search, Google Store, App Store... all platforms produce shitty feeds and search results. And before them we had TV and newspapers as slop making platforms.
The difference now is ANYONE can become a TV station. A newspaper. A radio talk show. While I’m all for allowing anyone to do anything, I’m also a fan of curation and quality over quantity. Social media has no value. Because it values nothing.
social media that has been gamified into an infinite scroll loop with the express intent to destroy attention spans and rebuild them around an advertising/behavioural structure of mark zuckerberg's ("they trust me ... dumb fucks") choosing? now yes that is cancer. but thats not really social media. theres nothing social about it.
i like the way someone put it here a few weeks back. we used to call these things social networks. then they became social media. so in that sense i do agree with you on a literal basis, although im not sure that was your intended point.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...
This whole thing is beyond ironic.
If there's a hole you need to fit and you do nothing with it, social media is the easy way out, and given that it does have addictive tendencies, we end up where we are.
Not only that but they then go on to spread this false news among there whatsapp friends
False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.