[HN Gopher] Study: Social media probably can't be fixed
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Study: Social media probably can't be fixed
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-08-13 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| duxup wrote:
| A lot of talk goes into how Facebook or other social media use
| algorithms to encourage engagement, that often includes outrage
| type content, fake news, rabbit holes and so on.
|
| But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage with that, and
| users even produce that content for social media platforms for
| free.
|
| It's hard to escape that part.
|
| I remember trying Bluesky and while I liked it better than
| Twitter, for me it was disappointing that it was just Twitter,
| but different. Outlandish short posts, same lame jokes / pithy
| appeals to our emotions, and so on. People on there want to
| behave the same way they wanted to on Twitter.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What gets me about some platform is all the text-in-images and
| video with senseless motion. I've been dipping my toes into
| just about any social where I could possibly promote my
| photography and the worst of them all is Instagram where all
| the senseless motion drives me crazy.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I miss geocities. The pages were ugly, but they were
| that users ugly ... gloriously personal ugly.
|
| Facebook is not my page, it looks nothing like I want... my
| content is in many ways the least important thing featured.
| derbOac wrote:
| > while I liked it better than Twitter, for me it was
| disappointing that it was just Twitter, but different
|
| I feel exactly the same way.
|
| I think there needs to be a kind of paradigm shift into
| something different, probably something that people in general
| don't have a good schema for right now.
|
| Probably something decentralized or federated is necessary in
| my opinion, something in between email and twitter or reddit?
| But there's always these chicken and egg issues with adoption,
| who are early adopters, how that affects adoption, genuine UX-
| type issues etc.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Probably something decentralized or federated is necessary
| in my opinion, something in between email and twitter or
| reddit?_
|
| So, Usenet? The medium is the message and all that, sure, but
| unless you change where the message originates you are
| ultimately going to still end up in the same place.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| >people CHOOSE to engage with that
|
| brains are wired that way. Gossip and rage bait is not
| something that people actively decide for, it's subconscious.
| It's weird saying that this is the problem of individuals -
| propaganda is effective not because people are choosing to
| believe it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage
|
| Kinda, but they also don't really realise that they have much
| more control over the feed than they expect (in certain areas)
|
| For the reel/tiktok/foryou-instagram feeds, it shows you
| subjects that you engage with. It will a/b other subjects that
| similar people engage with. Thats all its doing. continual a/b
| to see if you like what ever flavour of bullshit is popular.
|
| Most people don't realise that you can banish posts from your
| feeds by doing a long press "I don't like this" equivalent. It
| takes a few times for the machine to work out if its an
| account, groups of accounts of theme that you don't like, and
| it'll stop showing it to you. (threads for example took a very
| long time to stop showing me fucking sports.)
|
| Why don't more people know this? because it hurts short term
| metrics for what ever bollocks the devs are working on. so its
| not that well advertised. just think how unsuccessful the
| experiments in the facebook app would have been if you were
| able to block the "other posts we think you might like"
| experiments. How sad Zuckerberg would be that his assertion was
| actually bollocks?
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| There's definitely a mass of people who can't/won't/don't get
| past passive/least-effort relationships with things on
| screens. These would be the type that in the TV days would
| simply leave the TV on a specific channel all day and just
| watch whatever was on, and probably haven't changed their car
| radio dial from the station they set it to when they bought
| the car. In modern times they probably have their cable TV
| they still pay for on a 24 hour news channel and simply have
| that going all day.
|
| To be fair, in times far past, you really didn't have much
| choice in TV or radio channels, and I suspect it's this
| demographic that tend to just scroll down Facebook and take
| what it gives without much thought other than pressing Like
| on stuff.
| Mouvelie wrote:
| Yup. Knowing the exact percentage of those people would be
| hurtful to my soul I think, but I suspect they drive a
| meaningful percentage of business. Like that time when
| Netflix displayed shows on, because some people couldn't be
| bothered to actually choose something to watch ?
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Transparency would prove or disprove this. Release the
| algorithm and let us decide for ourselves. In my experience,
| Instagram made an algorithm change 3-4 years ago. It used to
| be that my feed was exactly my interests. Then overnight my
| feed changed. It became a mix of 1. interracial relationship
| success stories 2. scantily clad women clickbait, 3. east
| asian "craft project" clickbait, and just general clickbait.
| It felt as if "here's what other people like you are clicking
| on" became part of the algorithm.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Personally I really enjoy Mastodon and Bluesky but I am very
| deliberate at avoiding negative people, I do not follow and
| often mute or block "diss abled" people who complain about
| everything or people who think I make their life awful because
| I am cisgender or who post 10 articles an hour about political
| outrage. The discover page on Bluesky is algorithmic and
| respects the "less like this" button and last time I looked has
| 75% less outrage than the following page. (A dislike button
| that works is a human right in social media!)
|
| Once I get my database library reworked, a project I have in
| the queue is a classifier which filters out negative people so
| I can speed follow and not add a bunch of negativity to my
| feed, this way I get to enjoy real gems like
|
| https://mas.to/@skeletor
|
| Cross posting that would cure some of the ills of LinkedIn!
| avgDev wrote:
| Current social media have basically found the "bliss point" of
| online engagement to generate revenue and keep the eyes
| attached. These companies found a way to keep people hooked,
| and strong emotions seem to be a major tool.
|
| It really isn't a choice. It is very accessible. Many friends
| are on social networks and you slowly get sucked into shorts.
| Then, it becomes an addiction as your brain crave the dopamine
| hits.
|
| Similar to what Howard Moskowitz did with food.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I work in survey research and I'm rather appalled at how many
| people would rather survey a sample of AIs than a sample of
| people and claim they can come to some valid conclusion as a
| result.
|
| There are many ways AIs differ from real people and any
| conclusions you can draw from them are limited at best -- we've
| had enough bad experiments done with real people
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Int...
| jerf wrote:
| Appalling. The entire question of "fixing social media", for
| any definition of "fixing", involves not just the initial
| reaction to some change but the second-and-greater-order
| effects. LLMs are point-in-time models and intrinsically can
| not be used for even guessing at second-order effects of a
| policy over time. This shouldn't have gotten past the proposal
| phase.
| reactordev wrote:
| I trust your judgement more than Ars Technica.
|
| For us layman, the flaw of using AI trained on people for
| surveys is, human. Humans have a unique tendency to be
| spontaneous, wouldn't you say?
|
| How would a focus group research team approach this when
| they're bombarded by AI solutions that want their research
| funds?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The worst problems with people these days seem to be they
| don't pick up the phone. Probability-based polls are still
| pretty good about most things unless they involve Donald
| Trump --- it seems some Trump supporters either don't pick up
| the phone or lie to pollsters. Some polls correct for this
| with aggressive weighting but how scientific it really is is
| up in the air.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| "We trained a model on Twitter and Reddit content and were
| shocked to discover it generates a terrible community."
|
| It's so weird to live in a time when what you just said needs
| to be said.
| Mouvelie wrote:
| Genuine question : are you scared for your job ? I see this
| tendency to use "synthetic personas" growing and frankly,
| having to explain why this sucks is insulting in itself.
| Decision makers are just not interested in having this kind of
| thought argument.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Not really. Sales is doing better than it ever has since I've
| been here. For one thing, AI folks want our data. Despite
| challenges in the industry, public opinion is more relevant
| than ever and the areas where we are really unsurpassed is
| (1) historical data and (2) the most usable web site, the
| latter one I am a part of.
| richardubright wrote:
| Wait what? Is there an article on this. That sounds absolutely
| insane.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Lots of them, for instance
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3708319.3733685
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06950 "Large Language Models Do
| Not Simulate Human Psychology" is a recent preprint.
| naravara wrote:
| It doesn't surprise me if they found that the emergent
| behaviors didn't change given their method. Modifying the
| simulation to make them behave differently would mean your
| rules have changed the model's behavior to "jump tracks" into
| simulating a different sort of person who would generate
| different outputs. It's not quite analogous to having the same
| Bob who likes fishing responding to different stimuli. Sort of
| like how Elon told Grok to be "unfathomably based" and stop
| caring about being PC" and suddenly it turned into a Neo-Nazi
| Chan-troll. Changing the inputs for an LLM isn't taking a core
| identity and tweaking it, it's completely altering the
| relationships between all the tokens it's working with.
|
| I would assume there is so much in the corpus based on behavior
| optimized for the actual existing social media we have that the
| behavior of the bots is not going to change because the bot
| isn't responding to incentives like a person would it's
| mimicking the behavior it's been trained on and if there isn't
| enough training data of behavior under the different inputs
| you're trying to test you're not actually applying the
| "treatment" you would think you are.
| lispisok wrote:
| >I work in survey research and I'm rather appalled at how many
| people would rather survey a sample of AIs than a sample of
| people and claim they can come to some valid conclusion as a
| result.
|
| A YC company just launched doing exactly that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44755654
| SkepticalWhale wrote:
| I'd like to see more software that amplifies local social
| interactions.
|
| There are apps like Meetup, but a lot of people just find it too
| awkward. Introverts especially do not want to meet just for the
| sake of meeting people, so they fallback on social media.
|
| Maybe this situation is fundamentally not helped by software. All
| of my best friendships organically formed in real-world settings
| like school, work, neighborhood, etc.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I ran a co-working space social club that resolved this issue
| for many introverts in 2015-2017.
|
| This is at core a 3rd places issue, haven't had the capital to
| restart it post covid.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That sounds interesting. How did that work, did you rent a
| place for coworking and then opened it up for the social
| aspect?
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| My tech (I was founding engineer and CTO) company took over
| a co-working space and expanded it, we ran that portion of
| it at break even.
|
| We intentionally set out to create a social club/co-working
| space. A lot goes into it. I'm a non-theist who comes from
| a multi generational group of theist church planters (like
| 100s of churches, just over and over), it's a multi
| factorial process with distinct transitions in space-time
| and community size, where each transition has to be handled
| so you don't alienate your communities founding members
| (who will be very different from later members) and still
| are able to grow.
|
| People don't do it because they can't see the value while
| they are in the early mess of it. You have to like people
| to pull it off, you have to NOT be a high control person
| who can operate at high control at certain developmental
| stages. You have to have a moral compass everyone
| understands and you are consistent with, tech people like 0
| trust. You have to create a maximum trust environment which
| means NOT extracting value from the community but
| understanding that the value is intrinsic in the community.
|
| You have to design a space to facilitate work and play.
| It's not hard but you have to get everything right,
| community can't have mono culture and it must be
| enjoyable/uncomfortable, and you must design things so
| people can choose their level of engagement and grow into
| the community. It's easier once it has enough intertia that
| they understand they are building a thing with real
| benefits.
|
| Even things like the flow of foot traffic within the space,
| chokepoints narrowing, these kinds of thing all effect how
| people interact.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| That's very interesting. Do you have time to elaborate a bit?
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| I call it technology for touching grass e.g. look at The
| Offline Club [0]
|
| [0] https://www.theoffline-club.com/
| westurner wrote:
| Do all of these points apply to the traditional media funhouse
| mirror that we love to hate, too?
|
| > _" The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic
| outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve."_
|
| I see illegal war, killing without due process, and kleptocracy.
| It's partly the media's fault. It's partly the peoples' fault for
| depending on advertising to subsidize free services, for gawking,
| for sharing without consideration, for voting in ignorance.
|
| Social media reflects the people; who can't be "fixed" either.
|
| If you're annoyed with all of these people on here who are lesser
| than and more annoying than you, then stop spending so much time
| at the bar.
|
| Can the bar be fixed?
| cwmoore wrote:
| Sure can!
|
| "No smoking, gambling, or loose women."
|
| TaDAaaah!
| weregiraffe wrote:
| No loose men either.
| cwmoore wrote:
| Someone has to run the place.
| farceSpherule wrote:
| Social media is the new smoking...
|
| Widespread adoption before understanding risks - embraced
| globally before fully grasping the mental health, social, and
| political consequences, especially for young people.
|
| Delayed but significant harm - can lead to gradual impacts like
| reduced attention span, increased anxiety, depression,
| loneliness, and polarization
|
| Corporate incentives misaligned with public health - media
| companies design platforms for maximum engagement, leveraging
| psychological triggers while downplaying or disputing the extent
| of harm
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Not an accurate analogy in my opinion, but close.
|
| - Smoking feels good but doesn't provide any useful function.
|
| - Some social media use feels good and doesn't provide any
| useful function, but social media is extremely useful to
| cheaply keep in touch with friends and family and extremely
| useful for discovering and coordinating events.
|
| Fortunately the "keep in touch" part can be done with apps that
| don't have so much of the "social media" part, like Telegram,
| Discord, and even Facebook Messenger versus the main app.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| I think most of the social media power users don't connect
| with friends and family at all through the platforms. Young
| Gen Zers just scroll Tiktok (or whatever clone they prefer)
| and share the ones they like through
| snapchat/discord/telegram/messenger/sms/whatsapp. Some will
| post stuff for their friends to see through "close friends"
| or whatever, but it's much less personal than it once was
| with Facebook groups and whatnot
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Agreed. And it's not necessary when you have so many apps.
| They're using Tiktok for scrolling and Discord when they
| actually want to chat with their friends.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'Smoking get's me taking breaks, going outside more, and
| makes me more social chatting with my coworkers/others on
| smoke breaks'
| mvieira38 wrote:
| This analogy undersells the negative impact of social media.
| Smoking wasn't a propaganda machine at the hands of a few
| faceless corpos with no clear affiliation, for example, nor did
| it form a global spynet
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| I'm reading Tim Urban's book titled "What's Our Problem".
|
| It definitely explains the different types of thinking that I'm
| making up our current society, including social media. I haven't
| got to the part yet where he suggests what to do about it, but
| it's fascinating insight into our human behavior in this day and
| age.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Only some interventions showed modest improvements. None were
| able to fully disrupt the fundamental mechanisms producing the
| dysfunctional effects.
|
| I think this is expected. Think back to newsgroups, email lists,
| web forums. They were pretty much all chronological or maybe had
| a simple scoring or upvoting mechanism. You still had outrage,
| flamewars, and the guy who always had to have the last word.
| Social media engagement algorithms probably do amplify that but
| the dysfunction was always part of it.
|
| The only thing I've seen that works to reduce this is active
| moderation.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Social media can be fixed, its just the incentives are not
| aligned.
|
| To make money, social media companies need people to stay on as
| long as possible. That means showing people sex, violence, rage
| and huge amounts of copyright infringements.
|
| There is little advantage in creating real-world consequences for
| bad actors. Why? because it hurts growth.
|
| There was a reason why the old TV networks didn't let any old
| twat with a camera broadcast stuff on their network, why? because
| they would get huge fines if they broke decency "laws" (yes
| america had/has censorship, hence why the simpsons say "whoopee"
| and "snuggle")
|
| There are few things that can cause company ending fines for
| social media companies. Which means we get almost no moderation.
|
| Until that changes, social media will be "broken"
| wk_end wrote:
| > Social media can be fixed, its just the incentives are not
| aligned.
|
| So social media can't be fixed. Incentives are what matter.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Incentives can be changed though, through law.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Social media in a profit-seeking system can't be fixed. Profit-
| seeking provides the evolutionary pressure to turn it into
| something truly destructive to users. The only way it can work is
| via ownership by a benevolent non-profit. However, that would
| likely eventually give in to corruption if given enough time.
| Outlawing it completely, as well as regulating the algorithmic
| shaping of the online experience, is probably the inevitable
| future. Unfortunately, it won't come until the current system
| causes a complete societal facture and collapse.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| If enough users are destroyed, advertisers (social media's real
| customers) won't have sufficient markets for their products,
| and profits will fall. Social media can't destroy its users and
| survive.
|
| Seriously though, I disagree. Social media in a profit-seeking
| system can work if the users are the ones who pay. The easiest
| way for this to work-now that net neutrality is no longer a
| thing-is bundling through user's phone bills. If Facebook et
| al. were bundled similarly to how Netflix, Hulu and other
| streaming apps are now packaged with phone plan deals, then the
| users would be the focus, not the advertisers. This might
| require that social media be legislatively required to offer
| true ad-free options, though.
| MeIam wrote:
| The main reason that it can't be fixed is that it has political
| or corporate operators and propaganda bots have taken over. There
| is always an agenda running through threads of social media even
| for mundane topics that seeking supremacy.
| burnte wrote:
| Social media isn't the problem, people are the problem, and we
| still working on how to fix them.
| mritterhoff wrote:
| I think that's an oversimplification. People have problems
| sure, but just like alcohol, social media can and does
| exacerbate them. The answer to dealing with the former is
| regulation. I'm not sure that is feasible for the latter.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Social media leveraging the billions spent on marketing over
| the years, the skills of knowledgeable experts in multiple
| disciplines, basically thousands of human years of experts at
| manipulating people against a random person with zero guard up
| that wants to chat with their friends/make new friends isn't a
| people problem.
| standardUser wrote:
| > They then tested six different intervention strategies...
|
| None of these approaches offer what I want, and what I think a
| lot of people want, which is a social network primarily of people
| you know and give at least one shit about. But in reality, most
| of us don't have extended social networks that can provide enough
| content to consistently entertain us. So, even if we don't want
| 'outside' content (as if that was an option), we'll gravitate to
| it out of boredom and our feeds will gradually morph back into
| some version of the clusrterfucks we all deal with today.
| bentt wrote:
| If you could plug into the inner thoughts of millions of people
| around the world at once, it would not be pleasant.
|
| Social media has turned out to basically be this.
| Zak wrote:
| The study is based on having LLMs decide to amplify one of the
| top ten posts on their timeline or share a news headline. LLMs
| aren't people, and the authors have not convinced me that they
| will behave like people in this context.
|
| The behavioral options are restricted to posting news headlines,
| reposting news headlines, or being passive. There's no option to
| create original content, and no interventions centered on
| discouraging reposting. Facebook has experimented[0] with limits
| to reposting and found such limits discouraged the spread of
| divisive content and misinformation.
|
| I mostly use social media to share pictures of birds[1]. This
| contributes to some of the problems the source article[2]
| discusses. It causes fragmentation; people who don't like bird
| photos won't follow me. It leads to disparity of influence; I
| think I have more followers than the average Mastodon account. I
| sometimes even amplify conflict[3].
|
| [0] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/internal-research-
| from...
|
| [1] https://social.goodanser.com/@zaktakespictures/
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1#S3
|
| [3]
| https://social.goodanser.com/@zaktakespictures/1139481946021...
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