so on the point of empathetic people and social media.

firstly, i'm beginning to understand how it all works, psychologically. from experience, and referencing developer intent.

tl;dr is it's trying to illicit an emotional response to issues, whether disasters or topics

and for empathetic people, the quantity of those emotional responses is absolutely staggering. too many injustices exist in this world, and then you start feeling hopeless and/or jaded.

this is probably by design.

many social medias have decided that seeing things outside your sphere is something you absolutely want to know. there's almost no way to opt out. and for people who don't want to see distressing things to them, apparently tough! you have to go through a lot of hoops

and so eventually, these empathetic people try to limit exposure to these issues.

so... then what? you end up with people with less empathy getting to have a say on these issues because the empathetic people have checked out.

this, coincidentally, means status quo is preserved

since people with less empathy will naturally tend toward self-serving interests.

this sound familiar? it probably should.
since status quo is preserved, social medias are less likely to be held to account for their actions.

and then also, their users also slowly start to not have to deal with the consequences of their actions. this is how hate crimes, and other similarly depressing scenarios begin to occur.

and then that story gets thrust on people when it happens, causing more distress.

and this cycle keeps going. slowly, it will make those empathetic people stop putting in emotional effort.

and all because the empathetic people ~actually care~ about things. we should be boosting them up.

but we can't have that, with the attitude going around.
/thread