alt Hacker NewsThis might be controversial. Please disagree with me.
When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.
So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
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I think your experiment was valid, even if anecdotal. This article from January 2009 was talking about the phenomena of what it actually meant to have friends on facebook. Are you a "loser" or a "social slut"? This was at least a few years before most of the algorithms that we perceive as dangerous and enshittifying became core to the platform. The specific study they referenced (new link below) argued that there is genetic components in how we perceive our social networks.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/200901/faceb... https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0806746106
Where FB and Instagram are to blame is not just being aware of the psychological impact but amplifying it make it worse, especially onto a teen audience that has no capability of distinguishing the real world from social media. To them, it's the exact same. Your online social circle may be all you have in real life, not to mention the cyber bullying, unrealistic body standards and all the other awful parts that come when you gamify and reward capturing people's attention.
I won't deny that individuals are also responsible to guard themselves and especially parents, but these platforms have been accused (and are currently in US court) over the fact that they knew about the addictive potential of their platforms and made no safeguards over improving that. As a platform owner, you are responsible for all aspects of its success and failures, its highs and lows.
That’s nonsense. Nobody asked for algorithmic feed pushing schizo agenda on you.
> They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
Imagine the government saw the fentanyl crisis and started making fentanyl to support the habits of its citizens.
Not every single trend humans take on should be encouraged. We can be dumb as individuals, as well as collectively. At least in bursts.
"We deserve it" is the tldr I gather from you here, just like people addicted to opiates are ultimately responsible for the way those drug companies systematically set them up for that, right?
I disagree with you. These companies employ PhD scientists who know exactly what they're doing to find and exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities you confess to along with ones you and I don't even remotely realize we have. It's not innocent by any means whatsoever.