EMCrit 284 – You are the Product – Delete Your Algorithmic Social Media

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Algorithmic social media is stealing your joy and may be making your life dramatically worse. If you haven't watched The Social Dilemma, you probably should sit down and give it a view, especially if you have kids.

Advertising + Algorithm

Misalignment of incentives

Business model in which incentive is to find customers ready to pay to modify someone else's behavior

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The Algorithm

Get you to the app and keep you there

Movie Social Dilemma gets it Wrong

Negative trumps positive

Dopamine hit

Addictive, but mostly shallow or perhaps b/c of shallowness

Tribalism & Mob Behavior

Magnification of Fringe Views

Makes assholes more assholey

Attention is the reward on social media, and assholery gets the most attention

Loss of Objective Reality

Individual Apps

Facebook

The Worst!!!

A bunch of you are there so EMCrit has to announce new episodes there

Instagram

Just as evil

Reddit

Twitter

Sponsored Tweets

Built to inflict misery and turn people into assholes

Reub--bring it to Reddit

Twitter happiness feed

Youtube

Turn off "Up Next"

TikTok

Insanely addictive

Netflix

Algorithm with the right incentives

The News

Algorithm

If you can't change it, don't regard it as important

Google

not just creating an echo chamber

but actually sculpting Truth based on a political agenda

* Switching over to Hey Email

* DuckDuckGo

RSS

The way to have social media goodness come to you

Turn off Notifications

for any social media and for anything else possible

Go Deep instead of Shallow

If you have kids, avoid social media until ~16

Jonathan Haidt

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More Stuff to Check Out

* How to go from being an Ass-hole to an AYS-hole on Twitter

* 7 Ways to be Insufferable on Facebook

* How to Use RSS and Itunes to Maximize FOAM Podcasts

* The Online Hierarchy of Needs - Social Media and FOAM

Please ReRead 1984

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Now on to the Podcast...