Has the internet been a net positive or negative for humanity?

[SvennoJ]

Zkuq said:

SvennoJ said:

True, people have become more emboldened to speak their mind on the internet. I'm guessing it's partly realizing that privacy doesn't exist anymore anyway and positive reinforcement. The removal of the dislike button / hiding dislikes has further opened the floodgates to crackpot ideas. 

What I notice is that the PSVR sub reddit quickly deals with 'trolls' through the down vote button. That little bit of self policing / gate keeping has been removed from most social media. At Eurogamer it led to almost igniting a 'war' against the mods, things got out of control, tons of people got banned and now the comment sections there are a ghost of what they used to be.

It's just 2 anecdotes. Maybe the mods here have some perspective on any changes after the removal of the dislike button. Here it seems most people have either left, gone back to lurking or retreated into one of the official PC/XBOX/Nintendo mega threads. 

Social media has mostly been turned into a positive reinforcement machine:

Using only positive reinforcement can lead to an inflated sense of self-esteem, an overestimation of one's abilities, and the potential for negative or harmful behaviors to persist. While positive reinforcement is effective for building desirable behaviors, a sole reliance on it can create unrealistic expectations, make individuals overly dependent on external praise, and fail to address dangerous or serious misbehavior effectively.

That pretty much sums up the state of social media today...

That's a fair point about downvotes. However, at least here, it seemed that for every actually bad comment, there must've been like five decent enough comments that were downvoted, and I don't think that seems fair either. I guess 'self-moderation' is a tricky thing to do properly. I think I have/might be able to come up with some potential improvements, but it's not really ever going to be perfect - have to pick the upsides and the downsides that fit what you're trying to do with the community.

True, down votes were just as much used for trolling as 'burying' that behavior.

Also thinking a bit more about it, the removal of dislikes is a reflection of 'modern' schooling where positive reinforcement outweighs all criticism. I can't really blame social media for that as the rise of participation awards started in the 80's and 90's. Boomers trying to fix low-self esteem by showering kids with praise no matter what.

So it seems the pendulum has swung to the other side now and we're dealing with inflated self-esteem. Schools made kids dependent on external praise, aka likes...

I get the reason why VGChartz added the agree button (we had way to many posts quoting a post with the only contribution being "This", just click agree instead) so it's not really a like button but the effect can be the same. Yet the site traffic is so low there's no 'farming for clicks' here.

Yet social media seems obsessed with 'going viral'. And with monetization tied to views and likes, the internet is teaching kids you can make money by playing into people's emotions, while logical, complex arguments are mostly a waste of time.

Of course it was no different in the age of tabloids and newspapers. Catchy headlines same as clickbait, Sun page 3 to sell the tabloid, next to saucy rumors and conspiracy nonsense. The only difference is you can now keep scrolling tabloid type nonsense any time, any place on your phone without it ever ending. At least with a newspaper you still got exposed to some in depth articles, nowadays that's all filtered out to keep your attention with low effort tidbits. No more picking up a Reader's digest or Time Magazine at the doctor, dentist etc while waiting. Just keep scrolling the clickbait.