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0 pointswutbrodo5y ago0 comments

I think your projecting your own feelings onto the parent comment by adding "you must be toxic" to the beginning of that sentence. The only thing the parent commenter said is that the pattern of one's use can feed into the toxicity of their feed, without any judgment of that pattern per se. Nontoxic patterns that lead to toxicity exposure could be something as simple as "likes to read and post (non-toxically) about politics or social causes".

The takeaway of the parent comment was that there are plenty of ways to use FB, perhaps in constrained ways, that don't lead to toxicity and don't require leaving the platform.

Im not personally a big FB user, but have applied this very successfully to my Reddit and Twitter usage. I follow/subscribe to a very small number of very high-quality accts/subreddits, and am selective about when I read the comments. I'm able to derive a ton of value from this[1] pattern of usage without running into the bottomless pits of stupidity and malice that the average reddit/Twitter experience contains.

[1] including the holy grail: a political discussion forum full of a wide variety of viewpoints and populated solely by mental adults

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jjj1235y ago

I think you’re probably right about the intention of the original comment, but that doesn’t change the fact that it puts the responsibility on the user to change their habits to avoid toxic content, instead of on the platform.

These platforms use our conscious actions (what we like, who we follow) and our subconscious actions (how long we linger on particular posts, what kinds of posts keep us on the site longer than others) and produce something that is often toxic. You’re right that if you’re hyper conscious of your own interactions you can curate a peaceful feed, but idle browsing for anyone even slightly political is going to lead you down a rabbit hole.

That’s something the platform can change, and imo is something the platform is responsible for, since they’re the ones who made the ML algorithm that’s amplifying toxic content.

wutbrodoOP5y ago

> it puts the responsibility on the user to change their habits to avoid toxic content, instead of on the platform.

Why do you think this is true? Taking action to control what you can of your own welfare is entirely orthogonal to and doesn't diminish at all the responsibility of other actors. It's just wallowing in self-destructive victimhood to pretend that you can't take self-protective action while still advocating just as strongly for actors like Facebook to be held responsible.

Ie, the leap you're describing from "you can use Facebook healthily" to "Facebook bears no responsibility for the unhealthy usage patterns of most of its users" is one that no one but you (and the commenter you're agreeing with) has made.