And so what? Many of us left Reddit because it killed 3rd party apps to force us onto its shitty mobile app. Did it burn without us? No, I doubt they even noticed. Does that make our departure meaningless? Also no, we built something better here.
TBH this is just how it goes in general I think. A small group of people build something neat, and if it attracts enough people then the corporations and money come in, they attract more people and it all goes to shit, then a small amount of people from that group leave and start a new thing. reddit was the neat little alternative thing once.
I suspect eventually we’ll probably have to build a second internet lol
Left behind? If you’ve deemed a system to be so necessary that refusing to abandon your privacy at its behest means you are condemned to live in obsolescence, then you’re only reinforcing the idea that we must surrender our rights for the benefits of the system.
I’m old enough to have lived in a world without the internet and if it’s going in a direction that demands I surrender my right to privacy then I’ll return to a life without the internet. I won’t be alone and just like Lemmy I’m confident we’ll build an alternative that aligns with our values.
I have serious doubts that returning to a ludite existence is truly feasible anymore. These companies, along with governments, seem intent on making it a necessity to be online and to do so without privacy.
The CEO of nvidea outright said their plans for the future involve AI agents accessing your financials and PCs being replaced with AI boxes as our interface. If they force AI into enough stuff before the bubble bursts, it won’t be a choice. The way the net works will be built for AI, not for users to manually interface with. If the infrastructure is rebuilt for AI, it won’t be a choice. With governments all pushing for OS level Id, Microsoft trying to record all user action, the push to ban VPNs, it seems like you will be making that choice sooner than you want.
I hope it works out for you but anyone who remembers a pre-internet life is middle age now and isn’t the target market for emerging tech anymore. If AI proves to be significantly advantageous, not being online to sue it will be like refusing to use computers was to the boomers. You’ll be outcompeted and lose track of how the world is changing.
Sounds like you’re trying your hardest to convince yourself that it’s worth selling your soul for whatever they’re offering. If that’s the case then they’ve already won and it’s only a matter of time before your freedoms are stripped away and you willfully become a virtual slave for fear of missing out on whatever prosperity is being promised.
Oh I left Reddit because they permabanned me for something that wasn’t even violent and the platform is built specifically to make it hard to appeal and they don’t even give you warning like “take this down or we’ll ban you” you just comment and a few minutes later your account is lost to the ether.
They did you a favor. It happened to me maybe a month ago and I’m not missing it. I was pretty much down to using one sub only by the time it happened, though, so YMMV I suppose.
Yeah the only problem I have is that there are very few posts here and the communities have far fewer people. Reddit isn’t like TikTok how it can be pretty much replaced by IG reels or YT shorts, since it’s really unique with its content and community.
That said, every Reddit moderator is a fatass with a kink for how their own armpits smell
And what do you do when its a requirement to buy food, submit tax returns, get healthcare?
This is the problem people don’t understand. We have the same issue now in the UK. People think a voluntary system is easy ro just ignore until everything you rely and need forces you to starve or submit.
And its not going to stop at just age verification, it’ll continue until all you get to enjoy is maybe a loaf of bread, and some pond water! 🤦♂️
I might be mistaken, but I don’t think a government can force it’s citizens to have a phone. There has to be a way to pay your taxes, buy stuff, etc that doesn’t rely on you having a phone. Paper money still exists after all.
It might be possible to live disconnected rather than giving away your privacy. You’ll have to say goodbye to social media, but I don’t see it as a bad thing.
Why wouldn’t it be able to? That’s just a matter of which laws are enacted. And considering government is responsible for proposing and enacting laws, well…
He’s talking about the creep. The current legal battles are to establish the framework for all transactions of all kinds to be logged and processed digitally. A precursor to that is establishing a national digital ID.
First its optional and you can avoid things that use it. Then, slowly more things are on it and more and more people capitulate and get one.
Last, they require it for everything, and since they’ve already got most people to get one, resistance is lukewarm and they get their way.
It really amazes me that people don’t understand this when governments have done it time and time again but hey ho, hopefully I’m old enough that I might at least die before the worst hits because clearly people are to ignorant to do anything to stop it! 😳
Its unlikely that we will, too many people want this and the elites have created a system that has disempowered people completely. You work around it, with VPNs and use other sites.
Stop voting “strategically” and stop whining about largely made-up NDP critiques. People will voluntarily eat shit just because they heard that the cake on offer doesn’t have any icing.
That’s not a joke. This is a stupid government’s way of trying to halt generational harm and decline due to low quality parents. Everything listed is a “if they won’t, we’ll have to” solution. Unfortunately this means every child gets a Nanny State out of it and it’ll fail to work and likely backfire long-term, leading to more nannying.
Because it has nothing do to with parenting. You make a bizarre claim that there needs to be better parenting, when we both know that parenting has nothing to do with this.
You are suggesting, if I read what you said correctly that somehow they are able to get a foothold for these kinds of bills because of bad parenting. That is not true.
Point is, it doesn’t have to be bad parenting, that’s just the narrative. But if not, what is it then? What’s the foothold? As far as I can tell, it’s to protect children since that’s the narrative. How was that foothold given to them? They don’t need much to work with. If it were evident there were no foothold, there wouldn’t be one.
And, you’re exactly right, they would look for another if we had this one defended well. It is evident what the end goal is, but a defence is by minimising chinks in armour. If there were strong contrasting evidence to the very few bad parents, it wouldn’t be a foothold—they couldn’t use that narrative. But they seem to think there’s just enough of a chink for pressing fallacious generalisation.
Everyone knows kids just get around it all anyway, so that’s not the point, but they’re in because there was enough to make use of secundum quid. That’s almost always how authoritarian shifts worked in social history if not outright oppression through violence. We know it’s bullshit, but it works like that, unfortunately.
They don’t make them up. They only do that with absolute power or desparation.
Imagine you have no political influence or are directly involved in politics. But you want to ultimately be in a position of authority for personal boon. What’s your first move? What moves do you continue to make to get there?
Would making shit up work for you prior to established influence? Or would you pull out the historical playbook and chip away like it’s always worked?
At this phase, you’re already in sociopolitical influence. You got there by exploiting failed defences of the people already. Murder went from 1 to 2 in your town and you used that for your campaign. You’re a mayornow; do whatever you want so long as murder goes back to 1.
Everyone’s unhappy with the governor ignoring a single on-topic issue. You hyperfocus on that in your campaign, get the spot. Job done; do whatever again.
You now have influence over topics and the feed people see. Shape that for you by creating issues that aren’t really there—just like the murders—but now you can make them issues. Boom, you’re in the next phase.
So how to influence next and how to control next? Well, a kid did this horrendous one-off thing, or education performances are falling for many reasons, but the two can be linked through social media and poor parenting of it. Done. Push that one…
At this point you’re already so deep in there by just using the same tactic. “Where is there turmoil that I can use to my advantage?” You’ve beaten democracy, you’ve beaten narrative, you need to control the next frontier, and there’s an in. Hell, in 2026 you’re also using the same tactics to get richer and widen the class gap.
So now go back to being a normal person again, how do you make sure that foothold doesn’t exist? You just do be better at it to ensure it can’t be exploited by the instances of one-off.
You don’t have to be a sociopath to beat one, a community and a society just needs to be aware of how they work. They don’t have to work hard either, they just need to close up like a herd and do things better to close the gaps. Done long enough, they win through fatiguing those imposing authority AND there’s no downside. But it shouldn’t need to be said that better parenting shouldy be something that only happens when the parent is unhappy with a state exploiting it.
Yes, that’s a long message, but I’m trying to—very simply—makenaware of the much bigger picture of the play and variables. Just saying “This isn’t right!” never works and they know that attrition of foot holds at a controlled pace would never result in immediate violence or revolution. History is just available to you as it is to them. Use it.
Yes, yes they do. That has been a consistent thing over the last decade, maybe more. Completely fabricate problems to make people believe there is one.
Would making shit up work for you prior to established influence?
Yes. Happens all the time. That is exactly how it has worked recently. Look at the self declared Queen of Canada. She made it all up, lied through her teeth. Not charismatic, not wealthy, but knew how to just repeat bullshit until people believed it. Because they want to believe that someone else is the problem: bad parents, immigrants, whatever.
Because you’re trying to work around their excuse. If it’s not bad parenting, they’ll find some other absurd reason. Don’t even try to follow their nonsensical attempts to justify this invasion of privacy, that just gives them more fuel.
What explanation are you even asking for? Why shouldn’t you believe fucking authoritarian propaganda? lmao??? That’s like asking why pushing over old people and laughing at them is bad; if you don’t get it, you won’t get it.
Either I grossly misinterpreted what you said originally, or a bunch of you are daft.
Explain to me how providing ID to websites is good. Explain to me how this is good for your data privacy. Uploading all your photo ID and whatnot into some private corp or government database, where it absolutely will be linked with your account, which is already grossly tracked across the internet in numerous ways. you’re just asking to have your ID attached to your online activities.
Explain to me how OPs comment about better parenting is incorrect. Kids push boundaries and things that are forbidden are enticing.
Furthermore, after you’ve attached your online profiles to your picture ID, it will be moot because there will be ways around it and the legitimate users end up being the suckers with their ID linked across the internet.
Explain to me how firewalling Canada’s internet traffic and monitoring it all is good for us.
This is all just to remove more of your anonymity, which we barely have nowadays anyways.
Explain to me how providing ID to websites is good. Explain to me how this is good for your data privacy. Uploading all your photo ID and whatnot into some private corp or government database, where it absolutely will be linked with your account, which is already grossly tracked across the internet in numerous ways. you’re just asking to have your ID attached to your online activities.
You are clearly not reading the same thread I am. No one is defending those concepts; literally the opposite. You asked “why” in response to the statement that believing government propaganda is bad.
Sure, better parenting is good in a general sense, and parents should be mindful of what their kids are watching, but better parenting won’t stop governments from invading your privacy because they don’t actually do it in order to protect kids. They do it to control people, and they SAY they’re doing it to protect kids in order to keep people complacent until it’s too late. Believing the government when they say they need to protect kids from media is believing authoritarian propaganda.
You fell for their “won’t somebody think of the children?!” propaganda hook, line, and sinker. If they want suckers to let them overreach they just throw out terrorism or children as the reasons and people like you get in line instantly.
It’s not about children. It never was. It’s about getting a mandatory digital ID, where you have zero anonymity on the internet so they can keep you in line by threat of ruining your life and throwing you in jail.
Parents spend less time with their children than the state and culture does. Parents all work 8-10 hours a day, they can’t feasibly solve this through parenting, not without ensuring parents have the time and resources necessary to parent. That’s also not just to partner in the right directions, but to counter the efforts of billion dollar companies and governments who are all teaching children lessons that drive them in bad directions.
Parenting is not possible in the way it was in the past. Some kind of community parenting may work, but that’s an informed concept.
What can we do to stop this?
End capitalism. It’s no coincidence all these countries are pushing this in lockstep.
End goal is the death of online freedom.
Get angry, get involved in your local politics to bring democracy to the workplace and the economy.
It’s not gonna get better otherwise.
My plan is to just never submit to an age verification. Change servers or self host if necessary. Worse comes to worse, we log off.
That’s the spirit.
I’ll watch the system burn to the ground before I agree to privacy invasion.
But it won’t burn, it will be content to leave you behind.
Leave us behind? Where is it going?
And so what? Many of us left Reddit because it killed 3rd party apps to force us onto its shitty mobile app. Did it burn without us? No, I doubt they even noticed. Does that make our departure meaningless? Also no, we built something better here.
TBH this is just how it goes in general I think. A small group of people build something neat, and if it attracts enough people then the corporations and money come in, they attract more people and it all goes to shit, then a small amount of people from that group leave and start a new thing. reddit was the neat little alternative thing once.
I suspect eventually we’ll probably have to build a second internet lol
So it isn’t a choice between privacy invasion or watching it burn. It’s a choice between privacy invasion and being left behind.
Left behind? If you’ve deemed a system to be so necessary that refusing to abandon your privacy at its behest means you are condemned to live in obsolescence, then you’re only reinforcing the idea that we must surrender our rights for the benefits of the system.
I’m old enough to have lived in a world without the internet and if it’s going in a direction that demands I surrender my right to privacy then I’ll return to a life without the internet. I won’t be alone and just like Lemmy I’m confident we’ll build an alternative that aligns with our values.
I wish I was lucky enough to grow up in those times. Recently a mother almost lost custody of her kid because he was outside on his own.
I have serious doubts that returning to a ludite existence is truly feasible anymore. These companies, along with governments, seem intent on making it a necessity to be online and to do so without privacy.
The CEO of nvidea outright said their plans for the future involve AI agents accessing your financials and PCs being replaced with AI boxes as our interface. If they force AI into enough stuff before the bubble bursts, it won’t be a choice. The way the net works will be built for AI, not for users to manually interface with. If the infrastructure is rebuilt for AI, it won’t be a choice. With governments all pushing for OS level Id, Microsoft trying to record all user action, the push to ban VPNs, it seems like you will be making that choice sooner than you want.
I hope it works out for you but anyone who remembers a pre-internet life is middle age now and isn’t the target market for emerging tech anymore. If AI proves to be significantly advantageous, not being online to sue it will be like refusing to use computers was to the boomers. You’ll be outcompeted and lose track of how the world is changing.
You are missing the most important part - no matter who says what, people are still here.
We build the web, we make the food, we build houses. That doesn’t go away.
Sounds like you’re trying your hardest to convince yourself that it’s worth selling your soul for whatever they’re offering. If that’s the case then they’ve already won and it’s only a matter of time before your freedoms are stripped away and you willfully become a virtual slave for fear of missing out on whatever prosperity is being promised.
Oh I left Reddit because they permabanned me for something that wasn’t even violent and the platform is built specifically to make it hard to appeal and they don’t even give you warning like “take this down or we’ll ban you” you just comment and a few minutes later your account is lost to the ether.
God I hate that place so much.
They did you a favor. It happened to me maybe a month ago and I’m not missing it. I was pretty much down to using one sub only by the time it happened, though, so YMMV I suppose.
Yeah the only problem I have is that there are very few posts here and the communities have far fewer people. Reddit isn’t like TikTok how it can be pretty much replaced by IG reels or YT shorts, since it’s really unique with its content and community.
That said, every Reddit moderator is a fatass with a kink for how their own armpits smell
And what do you do when its a requirement to buy food, submit tax returns, get healthcare?
This is the problem people don’t understand. We have the same issue now in the UK. People think a voluntary system is easy ro just ignore until everything you rely and need forces you to starve or submit.
And its not going to stop at just age verification, it’ll continue until all you get to enjoy is maybe a loaf of bread, and some pond water! 🤦♂️
I might be mistaken, but I don’t think a government can force it’s citizens to have a phone. There has to be a way to pay your taxes, buy stuff, etc that doesn’t rely on you having a phone. Paper money still exists after all.
It might be possible to live disconnected rather than giving away your privacy. You’ll have to say goodbye to social media, but I don’t see it as a bad thing.
Why wouldn’t it be able to? That’s just a matter of which laws are enacted. And considering government is responsible for proposing and enacting laws, well…
He’s talking about the creep. The current legal battles are to establish the framework for all transactions of all kinds to be logged and processed digitally. A precursor to that is establishing a national digital ID.
First its optional and you can avoid things that use it. Then, slowly more things are on it and more and more people capitulate and get one.
Last, they require it for everything, and since they’ve already got most people to get one, resistance is lukewarm and they get their way.
It really amazes me that people don’t understand this when governments have done it time and time again but hey ho, hopefully I’m old enough that I might at least die before the worst hits because clearly people are to ignorant to do anything to stop it! 😳
May I introduce you to: the Flock camera
The impact that may have on navigating life seems significant. Have you even considered how that would actually work? Practically.
Vote.
Voting won’t do shit, the majority of people don’t even see the problem with these bills.
And that defeatist mentality is the reason shit doesn’t change.
Not a defeatist mentality. You should strive to change the vote for everyone instead of mindlessly voting yourself.
Vous avez beau ne pas vous occuper de politique, la politique s’occupe de vous tout de même
(You might not care about politics, politics will take care of you nonetheless)
For who? Where? I’m what?
Start with local elections, then move up to provincial and finally national elections. Vote the people in that won’t do this.
Take it a step further and run for election yourself.
Its unlikely that we will, too many people want this and the elites have created a system that has disempowered people completely. You work around it, with VPNs and use other sites.
Stop voting “strategically” and stop whining about largely made-up NDP critiques. People will voluntarily eat shit just because they heard that the cake on offer doesn’t have any icing.
Better parenting.
That’s not a joke. This is a stupid government’s way of trying to halt generational harm and decline due to low quality parents. Everything listed is a “if they won’t, we’ll have to” solution. Unfortunately this means every child gets a Nanny State out of it and it’ll fail to work and likely backfire long-term, leading to more nannying.
Stop buying in to the excuses the governments are using to hack at privacy and increase surveillance.
How could you possibly read that as “buying their excuses” when the context is “don’t give authoritianism excuses”? Did you make it past two words?
An authority doesn’t need much to deploy secundum quid. That’s arguably the most used tactic. It’s part of the backbone of any authoritarian ideology.
🤦
We’re so fucked, lol
Because it has nothing do to with parenting. You make a bizarre claim that there needs to be better parenting, when we both know that parenting has nothing to do with this.
You are suggesting, if I read what you said correctly that somehow they are able to get a foothold for these kinds of bills because of bad parenting. That is not true.
Almost got it.
Point is, it doesn’t have to be bad parenting, that’s just the narrative. But if not, what is it then? What’s the foothold? As far as I can tell, it’s to protect children since that’s the narrative. How was that foothold given to them? They don’t need much to work with. If it were evident there were no foothold, there wouldn’t be one.
And, you’re exactly right, they would look for another if we had this one defended well. It is evident what the end goal is, but a defence is by minimising chinks in armour. If there were strong contrasting evidence to the very few bad parents, it wouldn’t be a foothold—they couldn’t use that narrative. But they seem to think there’s just enough of a chink for pressing fallacious generalisation.
Everyone knows kids just get around it all anyway, so that’s not the point, but they’re in because there was enough to make use of secundum quid. That’s almost always how authoritarian shifts worked in social history if not outright oppression through violence. We know it’s bullshit, but it works like that, unfortunately.
They don’t need one. They will simply make it up. We have seen this over and over. That is why its pointless to even have this discussion.
They don’t make them up. They only do that with absolute power or desparation.
Imagine you have no political influence or are directly involved in politics. But you want to ultimately be in a position of authority for personal boon. What’s your first move? What moves do you continue to make to get there?
Would making shit up work for you prior to established influence? Or would you pull out the historical playbook and chip away like it’s always worked?
At this phase, you’re already in sociopolitical influence. You got there by exploiting failed defences of the people already. Murder went from 1 to 2 in your town and you used that for your campaign. You’re a mayornow; do whatever you want so long as murder goes back to 1.
Everyone’s unhappy with the governor ignoring a single on-topic issue. You hyperfocus on that in your campaign, get the spot. Job done; do whatever again.
You now have influence over topics and the feed people see. Shape that for you by creating issues that aren’t really there—just like the murders—but now you can make them issues. Boom, you’re in the next phase.
So how to influence next and how to control next? Well, a kid did this horrendous one-off thing, or education performances are falling for many reasons, but the two can be linked through social media and poor parenting of it. Done. Push that one…
At this point you’re already so deep in there by just using the same tactic. “Where is there turmoil that I can use to my advantage?” You’ve beaten democracy, you’ve beaten narrative, you need to control the next frontier, and there’s an in. Hell, in 2026 you’re also using the same tactics to get richer and widen the class gap.
So now go back to being a normal person again, how do you make sure that foothold doesn’t exist? You just do be better at it to ensure it can’t be exploited by the instances of one-off.
You don’t have to be a sociopath to beat one, a community and a society just needs to be aware of how they work. They don’t have to work hard either, they just need to close up like a herd and do things better to close the gaps. Done long enough, they win through fatiguing those imposing authority AND there’s no downside. But it shouldn’t need to be said that better parenting shouldy be something that only happens when the parent is unhappy with a state exploiting it.
Yes, that’s a long message, but I’m trying to—very simply—makenaware of the much bigger picture of the play and variables. Just saying “This isn’t right!” never works and they know that attrition of foot holds at a controlled pace would never result in immediate violence or revolution. History is just available to you as it is to them. Use it.
Yes, yes they do. That has been a consistent thing over the last decade, maybe more. Completely fabricate problems to make people believe there is one.
Yes. Happens all the time. That is exactly how it has worked recently. Look at the self declared Queen of Canada. She made it all up, lied through her teeth. Not charismatic, not wealthy, but knew how to just repeat bullshit until people believed it. Because they want to believe that someone else is the problem: bad parents, immigrants, whatever.
Because you’re trying to work around their excuse. If it’s not bad parenting, they’ll find some other absurd reason. Don’t even try to follow their nonsensical attempts to justify this invasion of privacy, that just gives them more fuel.
Why?
Because being stupid is stupid.
Good explanation…
What explanation are you even asking for? Why shouldn’t you believe fucking authoritarian propaganda? lmao??? That’s like asking why pushing over old people and laughing at them is bad; if you don’t get it, you won’t get it.
Either I grossly misinterpreted what you said originally, or a bunch of you are daft.
Explain to me how providing ID to websites is good. Explain to me how this is good for your data privacy. Uploading all your photo ID and whatnot into some private corp or government database, where it absolutely will be linked with your account, which is already grossly tracked across the internet in numerous ways. you’re just asking to have your ID attached to your online activities.
Explain to me how OPs comment about better parenting is incorrect. Kids push boundaries and things that are forbidden are enticing.
Furthermore, after you’ve attached your online profiles to your picture ID, it will be moot because there will be ways around it and the legitimate users end up being the suckers with their ID linked across the internet.
Explain to me how firewalling Canada’s internet traffic and monitoring it all is good for us.
This is all just to remove more of your anonymity, which we barely have nowadays anyways.
You are clearly not reading the same thread I am. No one is defending those concepts; literally the opposite. You asked “why” in response to the statement that believing government propaganda is bad.
Sure, better parenting is good in a general sense, and parents should be mindful of what their kids are watching, but better parenting won’t stop governments from invading your privacy because they don’t actually do it in order to protect kids. They do it to control people, and they SAY they’re doing it to protect kids in order to keep people complacent until it’s too late. Believing the government when they say they need to protect kids from media is believing authoritarian propaganda.
You fell for their “won’t somebody think of the children?!” propaganda hook, line, and sinker. If they want suckers to let them overreach they just throw out terrorism or children as the reasons and people like you get in line instantly.
It’s not about children. It never was. It’s about getting a mandatory digital ID, where you have zero anonymity on the internet so they can keep you in line by threat of ruining your life and throwing you in jail.
Parents spend less time with their children than the state and culture does. Parents all work 8-10 hours a day, they can’t feasibly solve this through parenting, not without ensuring parents have the time and resources necessary to parent. That’s also not just to partner in the right directions, but to counter the efforts of billion dollar companies and governments who are all teaching children lessons that drive them in bad directions.
Parenting is not possible in the way it was in the past. Some kind of community parenting may work, but that’s an informed concept.