Yes, and social media deliver on that wish by punishing nuanced opinions and anything which is not the lowest common denominator.
And they did that from the very beginning.
In the olden days what was acceptable on a web forum was defined by its owner and some mods. Everything had an alternative, people would communicate over few systems simultaneously - the forums themselves, ICQ, mail. When you were banned on some forum, you didn’t lose anyone of the people there.
It was certain that you can’t silence someone just by banning them. And conflicts were regular, so somebody and their friends would be banned or leave some place, but they were still part of a larger social fabric on some subject.
Social media style hate storms and insularity actually were discouraged. They bothered the mods, other people and in general were stopped by banning all participants for a month or so in the specific place the argument happened.
And what’s the normal behavior for social media today was unambiguously considered trolling back then. All of it.
When normies came to social media, they realized that now yes, you can silence anyone you don’t like, just have more friends or gaslight more strangers and that’s it. And you can troll as much as you want if it attracts more attention. In a social network there’s only one authority.
It was false in the beginning, people were not effectively silenced, and disinformation wasn’t that strong, but with more people moving to social media it became true.
OpenStars@discuss.online 4 months ago
I have seen social media described as “microblogging”, but I don’t think that’s true. Or rather, actual blogs like on WordPress are one thing, but the more “conversation” style is something else entirely. Phrases such as “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “and my axe” reveal that the true purpose of social media is emotional venting, rather than conveyance of information. For some people at least - and depending on moderation practices and abilities, and on communities setting up expectations, the level of discourse may be either higher or lower, but even so, foundationally, isn’t that what this place is for?
After all, Wikipedia articles are one thing, essays and poetry are another, blogs are still another (with the level of effort being put into their crafting), and finally at the lowest end, social media is found where we just blurt out whatever we are thinking about at any given moment.
Mind you, it can be done well - I have had people convince me of my privilege status & thus shepherd me into wokeness even on Facebook, which is not known for such - but even so, isn’t the true purpose of a thing what it mostly does? Like a vehicle isn’t a coffee holder, despite it being capable of that, as well as many other things.
Some people’s thoughts are just more worth listening to than others. Hence why microblogging e.g. Twitter/X & Mastodon can aim at a higher end, as too can Reddit & Lemmy/K/Mbin (+ soon: Sublinks), but it seems rarely used for its maximum purpose and far more often for its emotive vomit aka “share every single one of our uncurated thoughts”. Case in point: my message right here, which unlike a “blog post” took me <5 minutes to create.:-P
Btw, check out medium.com/…/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-8… for an example of what I would consider a more worthwhile post. Sometimes, imho, it is okay to aim for more quality than quantity of posts, even if that seems antithetical to the goal of “social media” that aims instead to connect people together to just shoot the shit amongst ourselves.