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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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when i stopped using soical media i was opening up my calender over an over because it was in the same spot. tge addiction it causes is real
I only use lemmy, i used to be in a loop of closing and opening discord before i stopped using it
And here i am on lemmy when I should be in bed. I don’t even need algorithms to keep me on my phone.
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Not just lemmy, but every fediverse platform can and should be trying to do better than centralized social media when it comes to mentally harmful / addictive patterns in our apps. I’ve tried to do some things to minimize addiction, but there’s a lot more we could be doing.
If you were to rank the things about lemmy that are most addictive, what would they be? Then we can think of ways to minimize or subvert them, where feasible.
IMO infinite scrolling, seeing the same things over again, and wanting to check like your own content likes / dislikes, are the worst offenders.
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People are lonely. They lack the kinds of interactions in their lives that make them feel comfortable and more importantly allow them to feel seen or understood. The mindless scrolling temporarily fills the void they have in human interaction while allowing them to interact themselves if/when they want to.
Humans are “addicted” to human interaction and the algorithms take advantage of that fact to make a product out of them.
Additionally, human brains seek out novelty. A lot of our day to day lives are filled with work and duties (chores, bills, children) etc. People in the 1920’s weren’t addicted to the news paper. They needed something to do with their free time that didn’t break the bank. Increasingly there’s just not that many things that you can put down to switch gears that fit that bill.
People blame algorithms a lot but I think even the core design means that social media is too addictive. Lemmy is addictive even with no algorithm or dodgy corporate ethics for example.
There’s been a lot of turd-polishing and pleasejustalittlebitbroism when it comes to social media in my opinion.
I think people should really read books like digital minimalism by cal Newport, stolen focus, surveillance capitalism, your brain on porn ecc to understand how social medias (but the internet in general) IS DESIGNED to be addictive, and what are the addictive traits.
Lemmy is definitely better but still holds some concepts from addictive social medias (not because of developers fault, I think they just tried mimicking popular socials, since these are born as “alternatives”). Infinite scrolling and upvotes are just two examples.
Some frontends do a great job leaving power to the user in that, like eternity, but I think a lot more consciousness should be raised on the topic and, at least in the open source / federated community there should be some guidelines on how to design social medias just as useful tools while minimizing distractions/useless/addictive parts.
It’s great to be decentralized, it’s great to avoid ads, profilation and targetization, but we can do better in designing really new and useful tools starting from certain principles.
Lemmy becomes an accidental skinner box, but the smaller community means you run out of new content to to scroll and end up logging off (right, y’all log off right?)
Corpo Social Media is designed to be a skinner box, to trap you in the scrolling loop dopamine dripfeed. No content too good hits your feed because if it does it doesn’t work to keep you scrolling.
That’s the problem I don’t log off. It would be good if lemmy could limit the amount of new posts you see each day to only include say the top 10 posts from your subscriptions because yeah… I spend more time here than I really should be.
Agreed
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Lemmy is definitely addictive but when comparing it to algorithm oriented platforms, we are basically comparing alcohol to cocaine. Both addictive but one way more than the other.
… Which are, by design, addictive.
The upvote/downvote system particularly.
You get a rush every time your comment or post goes into the 3 digits in upvotes, be honest.
You don’t need a sophisticated algorithm to have an addictive design either. All you need is for your home feed to give you more of what you want, which is what your subscribed tab does by default.
Lastly, the “ingroup/outgroup” psychological trigger lemmy induces you into (which was copied from Reddit), is also in itself highly engaging.
Literally anything can be addictive. Humans love pressing the dopamine button. The features that Lemmy has which are shared with other social media platforms can definitely increase the addictive potential.
Bro I was literally doomscrolling when I came upon your post, Lemmy definitely is addicting.
I guess we disagree a bit then. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not condemning Lemmy. I think it’s extremely valuable in democratising social media. And it functions brilliantly for communication and sharing knowledge. I’m just saying that a side-effect of its functionality is that it’s also addictive. For example I believe that there users who log in, help each other troubleshoot problems growing their tomatoes and then log out, but at the same time there are users who are passively consuming content from the feed way past their bedtime. There are even memes here about it.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?
I mean that although it doesn’t include the most egregious functions of corporate social media platforms it is still built around features like upvoting/liking, and infinite scroll, which were originally designed to ‘gamify’ social media in order to make it more addictive.
“Dopamine Nation” is a good book on this whole issue. I really wonder how much the dead internet theory might play a role in eventually breaking this cycle, or just younger generations being contrarian to older generations.
The language of this write-up has me envisioning social media as a parallel to the person-shaped holes in Junji Ito’s The Enigma of Amigara Fault.