Ah it’s the 2000s again. They’ll top it off with a global financial crisis. Probably the AI bubble collapsing or succeeding and destroying all the jobs.
Maybe the Americans will elect an Obama 2.0 after. Maybe not. There wasn’t MAGA last time. More likley it’ll be president mecha-Hitler or something this time around.
All talk.
Hypernormalized to the point where concentration camps are just another news article on any given day.
Americans are going to vote for Trump again anyways no matter who is the Democratic nominee. They’ll fall for whatever particular issue that makes them think they’d rather have Trump than the Democratic nominee. Just like in 2024. Terminally stupid country in the last days of its empire.
You start from “China bad” and the work backwards to fit your narrative. It’s almost pointless having discussion online on anything about China.
These are creative writing exercises on reddit. It’s gotten a million times worse since LLMs.
Boomers and Gen-X were the architects of the early digital era. Gen-X gets lumped in with Boomers because kids are dogshit at telling age. Older == Boomer to them. Boomers are the villain so we shall not give them credit for anything. That’s forbidden.
Millennials were too young to be able to make their mark on the early digital world. Millennials largely architected the social media era platforms by the time the generation came of age. This will never be in conversation because Millennials can do no wrong.
For some reason the benchmark is always the highest cost of living cities in America.
Maybe the ones obsessed with making it to the top in those cities are the most vocal online. I don’t know but it’s weird how that is.
They’re not reading but looking for keywords. People with low literacy do that.
I copy paste whatever the documentation tells me to do. Somebody wrote it for a reason.
They went from asscrack hanging out their dad jeans to looking ready to drop into the middle of a war zone.
The men’s team immediately turned a massive win into a massive embarrassment.
A stronger distinction could be made for the use of graphs on a widespread scale. That’s what I meant when I said lemmy doesn’t have a graph. The data structure itself is benign. When it becomes dangerous is when you’re playing god mode by dictating what individuals see. When that is applied that across the entire platform then you’re controlling entire societies. This is “the algorithm” that people speak of in common parlance even though they don’t know the underpinnings of it. It’s such a simple concept but extremely dangerous to humanity.
You can block on individual if they annoy you. This is a basic feature that existed on old forums and chat software. A single edge on a graph millions or even billions is insignificant. It’s a silly retort anyways that trolls use, thinking it makes them sound smart. Ignoring one or even a few idiots isn’t going to alter your algorithm. Not relative to the system as a whole which is orders of magnitude greater.
If anything the block feature is an antidote to algorithms that decide what we see. For some reason people don’t see anything wrong with having to be forced to confront your polar social/political opposites all the time. I can’t remember where I heard or read about this but studies shown that this does not work. It’s not productive.
The thing that people have to get over is that “the algorithm” isn’t correct by default. You’re not losing anything by blocking users or breaking from it entirely. There’s been more than enough evidence over the years that they do much harm. I have yet to see much strong evidence that they are beneficial. What has society gained from it? There’s nothing but sales pitches for adtech firms telling us that they have mastered how give us the best social experiences. Where’s the proof of that.
The end social media maybe. It’s fundamentally broken anyways. They can keep breaking it worse for all I care.
We’re not meant to be ruled by algorithms. It was a stupid idea to listen to antisocial neckbeards selling the world on how they could master sociology with graph theory. These are the same geniuses who deride soft sciences as not real science.
It’s called the Social Graph. Platforms that implement a social graph are social media.
The fact that people don’t know this basic, fundamental mechanism is the problem. Even the technologically inclined haven’t been able to make this simple distinction.
People think “social media” means a place for people to be social. That’s not it. Social media is specifically platforms that implement the social graph and/or similar types of algorithms that are designed to manipulate sociological relationships.
Traditional message boards are not social media because there is no algorithm. In the past reddit wasn’t social media because it technically did not have a social graph. It was a simple aggregrator with comment sections. That alone does not make social media. reddit does have a social graph now. That’s when it became social media.
Lemmy doesn’t have social graph algorithms.
The social graph is quite possibly one of the most dangerous inventions the 21st century and nobody talks about it. Yet it rules your entire life. It’s what makes the world turn. It’s what is dictating cultures and societies. It’s what is determining what goes viral. It determines the daily headlines.
Pretty much what people already know by now. Algorithms find optimal ways to manipulate you.
The two ingredients are data and a way to measure the thing you’re trying to optimize. Machine learning is used to find optimal ways to keep people engaged in internet platforms. In other words they’re like designer drugs.
Worse than designer drugs. They’re continuously self optimizing because they keep measuring the results and making adjustments so the result stays optimal. As long as they have a continuous feed of recent data, the algorithm evolves to find the optimal solution.
That’s why recklessly giving away your personal data is dangerous. Let’s say the system notices you’ve been spending 1 microsecond less time engaged in screen time. The system will adjust to make sure they’ve reclaimed that 1 microsecond of your day.
It will show you things that tend to keep you engaged. How does it know that? Because you give it the data it needs to measure what keeps you online more. That data is based on every interaction with your phone or computer which is logged.
It’s worse than substance abuse because you never develop a tolerance. If you do then the algorithm has already adapted to find the next thing that keeps you engaged in the most optimal way.
It’s not just engagement. It’s whatever target you want to optimize for. As long as you have the two ingredients. Data and metrics.
That’s why data is called the new oil. Or was it gold rush? I can’t remember. It’s been called this since the early 2000s maybe.
LLM AI isn’t so scary when you know that they’ve been using AI against us for a very long time already. If more of the world understood all this better, we’d all have quit to study poetry already.
This kind of work now pays hundreds per hour. They verify credentials of course.
I haven’t looked at Discord since December after getting into an argument. So perfect timing I guess.
The platform is ass anyways. Monetized features everywhere.
That doesn’t make sense. The tech bros have been saying for decades that all this data harvesting and surveillance will be used to improve lives.
The internet is never not a shitshow when it comes to women.
Except when it comes to a country like India or Japan. Then it’s all like nodding and agreement that those men are creeps who need to be restrained.