• 8 Posts
  • 181 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Even outside of the content being viewed, there may be a huge difference in effect depending on who is viewing it. Almost all of the current studies are on University students, probably western demographic most able to socialize with others due to need, proximity, and free time. Debatably, they’re also among the most impressionable groups as well, given that they’re still not fully grown and are in the middle of trying to figure out and plan their lives. Intuitively, this would mean they’re more able to take advantage of their time off social media, and more impacted by their time on it.

    This begs the question of if the effects will be the same in other populations. For example, in populations that are less able to socialize, does social media help reduce the burden, and if so, what platforms or elements have this effect versus more negative effects.


  • I think social media probably isn’t great, but the data also isn’t particularly conclusive, and much of it is very broad and unhelpful. For example, in the first study you linked, it had a sample of 143 University students accross three different social media sites, measured only using app battery usage. While it isn’t to be completely discounted, esspecially alongside the larger body of work, it’s sample size is tiny, and the data collected isn’t esspecially representitve of what is supposed to be measured, as it includes non-social-media tools like Facebook Marketplace while excluding social media accessed via the browser (among other flaws). The vast majority of studies on the topic, regardless of findings, have similar flaws.

    IMO, social media as a whole is too varied to meaningfully lump together, and a lot of the impacts that are commonly attributed to social media are better attributed to deeper causes regarding lack of sociatal trust and support. Tracking the impacts of social media is hard enough, nonetheless the impacts of something like the lack of third places, and impacts of economic inequality on mental health.





  • The biggest thing for me is searchability. After a post is off the feed, it may as well be deleted. God help you if you’re looking for something new, like a guide or help post. Most of the Fediverse is unindexed by search engines, and the built-in Lemmy search makes Reddit search look like Google in it’s prime. I know PieFed has helpped a bit by adding flairs, so you can at least sort by that, but to my knowledge thats about as far as anyone has gone trying to address this.




  • As someone who admittedly isn’t super familiar with Japan’s military, and only vaguely of their politics, this sounds obvious with the current state of the world. China seems to be rapidly arming, and they’ve seen how unreliable US support is in the lack of support for Ukraine and the increasingly unstable current government.

    If anything, I’m really shocked more nations aren’t re-arming.




  • To be fair, between the overzealous pushes from the Linux evangelists, the lack of accessible documentation, the buggyness of some of the common software, and the heavily-relied-upon community support, its usually very hard to tell if your experience will go smoothly or not.

    For example, previously, when I had problems with Linux Mint, it was with a pretty bog-standard B350m mobo’s built-in sound. According to the dozen or so people I consulted over it, it should have worked, but for whatever reason, didn’t. More recently, I decided to take another shot. I knew my mouse (A Razor Naga X) wasn’t supported, but google told me Open-Razer covered all the important functionality. This turned out to be wrong, as Open-Razer was mostly for customizing RGB and lacked core functionality like button rebinding.

    Don’t get me wrong, I still use Linux on some secondary devices, and consider it a (mostly) viable Windows alternative, but blaming all the problems on users ignores the massive number of issues with current Linux desktop.





  • binary != digital actually. Digital is any system using whole numbers. For example, a trinary computer using using trits (base 3 instead of base 2) can also be digital.

    To be extra pedantic, analog is almost always held to be specifically refering to technology/machines as well, but its still a good metaphor for gender.