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Comment by haswell

2 days ago

In practice, I have never encountered a person who benefits from such negative self beliefs in the long term, or anyone who would claim they were beneficial. My perspective on this is driven by many years of real world experience with addiction and related communities, and more personal exploration of the negative bias than I can quantify.

There’s a good reason addiction recovery is now often focused on the underlying issues of shame and other negative self beliefs. They tend to be at the root of the issue, despite being the default reaction people feel towards themselves due to social conditioning.

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haswell

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doublerabbit  2 days ago

Your not wrong, I do agree. But for a pet-project, it's a bit of fun? Or should we just face it.

Everyone is a loser for using social media?

  • haswell  2 days ago

    This just doesn’t land for me.

    Quite a bit of social media use happens for perfectly good reasons. Organizing local events, finding and attending local events, meeting people in other regions who care about a common cause, etc.

    What tends to distress people is that social media is also a toxic hellscape that simultaneously stresses them out and addicts them by playing on their evolutionary instincts and needs for social connection while feeding them engagement bait.

    And so unplugging is a common topic these days, because people are trying to live better lives.

    I get that it’s a pet project, but if this pet project was aimed at alcoholics trying to get sober, I think people would look at it in a different light because people take alcoholism seriously, and reinforcing negative loops that actually perpetuate alcoholism would be justifiably criticized.

    I personally don’t think we’re taking social media harms seriously enough collectively, although there are signs that people are catching up. So while I think this project comes from the right place and I’m all for having a bit of fun, I think it’s actually quite problematic in its current state given the issue it attempts to address, and I don’t think the fact that it’s intended to be fun should shield it from the feedback it’s getting.

    > Or should we just face it.

    The sentence following this is just objectively false to a degree that I don’t even see the humor in it. It’s schoolyard stuff that perpetuates the problem.