I just wish we had a bit more political balance here… I’m not talking about fascists, but more people that don’t blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice…
For real. I once had the misfortune to admit to having some Centrist ideas, and the down votes were immediate and generous. No discussion, just personal attacks.
And we wonder how things got to where they are.
That’s gonna be kind of an issue in a network where civil discourse and disagreement falls between calling people a Nazi/fascist at best and wishing them double death by murder rape at worst
Just picturing that, as you type this, you have a swastika tattoo on your forehead.
“Why is everyone so judgemental? I’m not one thing! A person contains multitudes!!!”
If nearly everything currently wrong with the country weren’t due to capitalism run amok I could sympathize. But unfortunately it’s not the 1960s anymore.
[Entire world on fire] “I just wish everyone wasn’t so fixated on discussing the fire, how it started and who’s responsible…”
You have to realize how mesmerizingly obtuse your comment is?
Sorry this is a platform for people if you’re an ostrich then please go back to sticking your head in the sand
Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There’s no way the majority of comments in the near future won’t just be LLMs.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
10th largest instance being like 10k users… we’re talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
There isn’t a solution. People don’t want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that’s sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they’re a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn’t a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It’s better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there’s a social media not-for-profit that’s trusted to manage identity, that people don’t mind contributing costs to. But that’s a huge undertaking. One day hopefully…
They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want.
The same analogy is applicable to food.
People want to eat fastfood because it’s tasty, easily available and cheap. Healthy food is hard to come by, needs time to prepare and might not always be tasty. We have the concepts of nutrition taught at school and people still want to eat fast-food. We have to do the same thing about social/internet literacy at school and I’m not sure whether that will be enough.
So we need a documentary like Super Size Me but for social media. I think post that documentary coming out was the only time I’ve seen people’s attitudes change in the general population about fast food.
It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
@a1studmuffin @ceenote the only reason these massive Web 2.0 platforms achieved such dominance is because they got huge before governments understood what was happening and then claimed they were too big to follow basic publishing law or properly vet content/posters. So those laws were changed to give them their own special carve-outs. We’re not mentally equipped for social networks this huge.
I disagree, I think we’re built for social networks that huge. The problems happen when money comes into the equation. If we lived in a world without price tags, and resources went where they needed to go instead of to who has the most money, and we were free to experiment with new lifestyles and ideas, we would thrive with a huge and diverse social network. Money is like a religious mind-virus that triggers psycopathy and narcissism in human beings by design, yet we believe in it like it’s a force of nature like God or something. A new enlightenment is happening all thanks to huge social networks allowing us to express our nature, it’s the institutions of control that aren’t equipped to handle such breakdown of social barriers (like the printing press protestant revolution, or the indigenous critiques before the enlightenment period)
