bT015-sppac: Imageboards Vs. Social Media
The -sppac flag means "small post, prompt, angle, and context."
bT015-sppac
Imageboards Vs. Social Media
Prompt: What’s more ultimately preferable, Imageboards or Social media?
Angle: Terminology used in this post looks at 4chan and social media as “both bad”, with 4chan’s “bad” being derived from it’s population, and social media’s “bad” being derived from it’s use model.
Context: Writer began her conscious and tangible internet presence on 4chan, assorted imageboards (711chan 7chan etc), SomethingAwful, and IRC at age 13~14, 15 years ago.
On one hand we have imageboards that are cesspools and require a healthy means of contending with hostile people, understanding that you are you. The things you believe in can be stood up for and it's how one develops their own means of contending with hostile people and social aggressors.
On the other hand, we have social media that is completely algorithm-driven. People in bad places are driven to radicalization because of that. People in good places usually remain in there, until their algorithm is modified. Unhealthy rapid fluctuations of emotion, while rewarding both the virality model of "who thinks what you are saying is worth ever seeing" and punishing people who stand up for themselves. These websites don't protect us, platform people who either directly advocate for the harm of us, or actively try to game engagement and algorithms to further platform and spread tidbits of skewed data, cherry-picked articles, and actively fear-monger people to hate us. They remove dislike functions, forcing every user to contend with this idea that "It's less about the decisions that you make, and more about what the algorithm decides that you want to see."
Until algorithmically-driven websites stop actively being exploited for the express purpose of a stochastic approach to getting what you want - this idea that they're all trying to spread hateful garbage until someone goes on a lone-wolf type situation, they are utterly useless to any of us, to the struggle that we all collectively face.
At least 4chan “is bad” because “there are bad people there.” On normal social media, we don't even know why it's bad. We don't know everything about how the bad actor networks form - but on imageboards, that sort of thing can be analyzed and studied reliably. It's “bad” because there are real, “bad” people there." We can trace it's history back to it's infancy, and we can easily analyze how such a website "rewards misery" which in turn primes potentially dangerous people to act in potentially dangerous ways.
Perhaps one functions on clout, and one functions on anti-clout. The spectacle of non-spectacle. The spectacle of internal stagnancy, and the lashing against it.
In the vein of my recent advocation for a soft net-crash, and a yearning for the returning to an age when the internet was not locked down by Cloudflare and Amazon, not dominated by AI and their algorithms, zookept by companies, a time when movements were organic and not at the mercy of a TOS, when real and tangible solidarity to stand up for the things that you believed in required trustworthy and solid leaders, intelligent people that deeply wished to present a better path forward that works for people - we still do this. But AI and algorithms have made it difficult.
To some degree, I honestly find it more desirable to have social media that functions on that simple, hard, imageboard basis. None of this AI-assisted content delivery. An AI and it’s algorithms are beginning to control what you see and process, multimedia, developing another world for you, separated from reality - we’ve seen it happen so many times - an AI and it’s algorithms begin to approach, potentially, the role of a god and it’s angels.
This is not something that we should strive to do. Disassembled these things, or make these systems open-source and studied and analyzed in a way where we can gain media literacy for the AI age.
Instead of making our problems invisible by use of AI and algorithms, we need to seek to actually solve our problems.