alt Hacker NewsI think social media is being wrongly made in to a scapegoat
Rather, social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at, of not having meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, of lacking certain other things that may have existed in the past.
Social media offers a new engaging experiment that fills the void of some of these things that don't exist elsewhere otherwise but doesn't act as an equivalent replacement
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I was not an athlete growing up. Didn't do much in organized sports. But all three of my kids play a team sport. It does wonders for them. I really helped them get out of the pandemic. But having them outside several hours a week, working with peers and other adults, practicing new skills. Really cool to see and I think it really helped their mental health (and by extension, my own).
It seems to be a bit of both working in tandem. Social media companies are in a race to the bottom of what is socially acceptable to drive as much engagement as possible. But a lack of third spaces also pushes folks into that cycle.
The term 'social media' has changed a lot over time. The attention grabbing kind we have today is a very different beast than what we started out with; no ads and only a chronological timeline showing posts from your network.
The original kind was genuinely connecting people and adding value. The current one is in effect isolating and driving people and groups apart.
Luckily, the original kind did not vanish. I find a lot of joy hanging out on the fediverse. I spend far less time on it than what I did on Twitter of FB back when I still had accounts there, but that is a good sign.
Social media is too generous term to use when describing products from Meta, TikTok, Snap, X etc. It is an ad platform that also, occasionality, shows you what your friends are up to.
We should come up with a better term than 'social media' when describing platforms that has reached the last stage of enshitification.
Are you positing that not-young people aren’t suffering from the same?
Because of social media, there are less teenagers hanging out at the malls. Shops close down. It forms a feedback loop
> social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at
I see all kinds of active third spaces, but never any young people in them.
I get that it is hard to bootstrap now. Trying to convince a 20 year old that they should hang out with a 70 year old to get the ball rolling for more 20 year olds to show up is not an easy sell, but when I was 20 (just before the emergence of social media) these same third spaces were full of people of all ages. It was bootstrapped once upon a time.
Why did the young people stop coming?
Social media companies are actors that actively compete for the attention of young people. That does result in collapsing third spaces and social events because it’s easier/cheaper to just post on IG or hang out on discord.