Wrong question.

The right question is “What is the societal and economic value of a community space where the human element has been rendered functionally invisible?” to which the answer is of course “There is none”.

The problem isn’t with social media, the problem is with letting billionaires and corporations completely ruin social media and push rightwing beliefs while we pretend it isn’t an existential issue.

Time is run by a rabid pro-trumper…

The main reason the wealthy keep buying up social media, is to prevent the 99.9% of Americans from realizing we have more in common with each other than the wealthiest 0.1%.

So of course they’re gonna push articles telling people to skip the middle men and go back to listening to traditional media the billionaires have a tighter grip on.

Social media’s value comes from its ability to influence the public.

AI’s value comes from its theoretical ability to replace humans in jobs and in influencing the public.

Edit- both could be useful but the people in charge of those businesses are the absolute worst type of people. They don’t want a good version of their product. They want a monetized version of their product.

I think the user bears some responsibility here too. Consuming an unfiltered social media feed isn’t ideal, in my opinion. Mindlessly scrolling through whatever TikTok’s algorithm serves you is exactly how people get sucked into rabbit holes where they can no longer even tell what’s real and what’s fake.

The same goes for platforms like Lemmy - the difference is that instead of algorithms, your feed is handpicked by people with agendas, sprinkled with a few bots. We’re all gullible. We like to think we’re not, but we are. We believe what we want to be true and seek out what confirms what we already think. Unless you actively go out of your way to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and expose yourself to alternative views then noise and confirmation bias is what you’ll mostly get.

I mean… I’ve had a lot of genuine interactions with real people which I would not rate highly.

A sort of reddit holodeck would be obviously desirable, sometimes, but any concerns about solipsism or narcissism come far behind the expectation you’d want to run that shit locally. What is the value of disappearing into your own little world if you don’t even control it?

Bots trained from bots, talking to bots, governed by THE ALGORITHM… surely this will end well.

It’s fun.