this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
1436 points (98.1% liked)
Funny
6800 readers
555 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Things like BBSs, Usenet and IRC are all social media. So is Lemmy for that matter.
I don't think social media itself is the problem, it's the big tech / purposefully biased algorithmic content selection part that screws it up.
But you had to deliberately look for BBSs that contained what you wanted. Platforms weren’t as all-encompassing as they are now compared to the scattered and independent phpBB groups of yesteryear. People didn’t have social media in their faces all the time. You had to dial-up and go looking for whatever it was, whether it was AIM, ICQ, or your favorite forum.
No, social media in the super-limited context that it existed in 20 years ago wasn’t an issue. It absolutely is an issue today because of their size, popularity, ease of access, and definitely the algorithms.
Lemmy can have its fair share of echo chamber syndrome. For example, almost nobody here vocally likes Reddit, and if you post anything pro-Reddit, it's likely to be met with a lot of negativity. I'm anti-Reddit too, for the record, but it's good to acknowledge tribalism even when you agree with the tribe. But the nice part is Lemmy can't have competing echo chambers nearly as easily as Reddit can because we're so much smaller.