/The Social Dilemma

 

/The Social Dilemma is a 2020 Netflix documentary I have only just got around to starting.  Except I seem to have read all about what it is about anyway.

Social Media is designed to be addictive, manipulating and keep you "wasting time you could be spending doing something beneficial" in the process of changing your behavior, for the sake of the site Advertisers . The way it manipulates and is addictive also makes you feel pretty terrible much of the time.  The Fear Of Missing Out is part of this too.  A key point is Advertisers may have a product or a political agender, and dis-information is more profitable.  

The ex-senior people from social media companies go into details on how they do that, with re-enactments as demonstrations.

A key thing happens early. A main guy in this documentary, at Google at the time, wrote an article how terrible all this manipulation was and sent it to colleagues in Google. One day he was told the company CEO was told about it 3 times in one day, must have read it too... and absolutely nothing happened about it. 

Four years later,  absolutely nothing happened about it, and it is just as manipulative.  The companies themselves aren't ever going to change direction. 

Except that for me, it seems not checking Social Media is getting far easier, as it now doesn't actually show anything I care about any more.  Facebook stopped showing anything any friend posted years ago, doesn't show anything I post to anyone unless I want to pay(!), so I get so little engagement there is nothing to miss out on there any more.  That Fear Of Missing Out is just gone.

I don't, and have never used any social media apps, except Facebook Messenger.  Only ever use a web browser, never have notifications ON, and that seems to be a significant factor in not being manipulated "as much" (but still to some degree). 

X (was Twitter  after Mulosk screwed around with it), is similarly filled with rubbish in the For You time line, that I don't need to check any more. But to see what Urasawa Naoki is up to, and when the next episodes of Manben Neo will be, I have to directly check his account.  And others I care about too. 

Mastodon social media do not have the manipulation and addiction of the commercial social media sites, but also not a whole lot of incentive to log on and stay active long on the site either.  Just lots of small talk.  Also "seems like" the separate hosts don't share posts between them, so you end up having a very small potential audience there.  

To counter the hell of commercial social media, it has been loudly suggested we go back to using RSS Feeds and an RSS Reader to make your own "social media timeline" , from websites and blogs you like and follow, the way we did before the infinite scrolling timeline and social media existed.  I do like this old school approach, but people like that fore mentioned mangaka, Urasawa Naoki  don't have a blog or website.  The NHK Manben website also doesn't have a RSS Feed, so making your own feed is not always possible. Probable solutions, like a bot to scan the web and make an RSS Feed from places that don't natively make them, seems too much work. Not something interested in paying for either. We will wait and see. 

Think for the majority of Internet uses, RSS Readers and the like are not something they would ever use.  

I have tried a few RSS readers. Raven, Feedly and Inoreader. I have also published our website RSS Feed again, something I stopped many years ago, as I have to generate it manually (with a little help from FeedEdit) when ever I update a page on our website. What that means is I have complete control of what is in the Rss feed, and used it to test the Feed readers.  I have found the free Inoreader and Raven to work fine, but Feedly has an issue not being updated. It could be Feedly or it could be the host blocking Feedly, and if my hosting company does that, then who knows what others do too.  The advantage of an Online feedreader, such as Inoreader. is you can use it in a browser on the desktop AND your phone.  Feedly seems to get all the recommendations, but I guess, like everything on the Internet, you can't believe everything you read.    

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