Meanwhile the geriatric class is being taught the same lessons through Fox News and their ilk. My mother loves to spout the praises of the latest exploits of Elon Musk every time I talk to her and I’m just like “mom, Elon Musk is a billionaire, which automatically means he a piece of shit.”
Are we, the in-betweens - going to be the only ones who remember now that they’ve co-opted all channels of “information” - for young and old alike?
I’ve seen this movie before.
I’ve not read Spinoza, but this idea has for most of my life seemed fairly self-evident. Something clearly seems to exist, I’m not the biggest most important thing in the something, though I am a part of it. Do I believe in God? Not per se - but I do believe there is something incomprehensibly larger than I am, and that in and of itself deserves a little respect and contemplation.
My religious parents didn’t see it that way of course.
Algorithms are not universally good and helpful. They should be designed to boost engagement only in that they serve to find content you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise, not to boost engagement at all costs by feeding you things they think you will click on. It’s an important distinction.
Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It’s very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. The youngest users here may not even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different experience altogether. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it somewhere and Google would see it and point it out to you.
Not anymore. Everything’s on Facebook now and Google can’t see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook’s data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.
Remember when sites would make bad decisions and then just, you know… fucking die? Reddit’s entire existence is owed to Digg imploding like the Titan submarine.
Notice how that doesn’t happen anymore? No matter how egregious their infractions, no movements away from Twitter or Facebook - no matter how deeply they are infiltrated/compromised by runaway fascism/capitalism - nothing has an impact. No backlash, no matter how huge - is strong enough to shutter these sites and make them stop being money-printing operations.
It’s almost like there is an infinite money glitch going on and no matter what, if you’re in the “in” crowd, your shit gets to stay around no matter how much everybody thinks it smells like shit.
Hm.
Try not caring. The more Reddit users come here the more it’s going to suck.
This is just bot-driven FUD anyway, Lemmy is nothing like old Reddit and it wouldn’t be disqualifying if it was.
Frankly, whatever secret sauce it is that makes social media popular is also what drives them to be such shit and be so shit for society. I like Lemmy way more than I like Reddit, and even though I have to go back to Reddit from time to time to fill the needs of my niche interests (which can get no traction where there are not mobs of participants in the greater whole) I never ever look at my interactions there and go “I wish Lemmy was more like this.”
It’s a conundrum.
Personally I never even considered installing it because of its stupid name.
Nobody said they are. However, “a great fediverse alternative to Facebook” does not mean, in the minds of most people who might read it: “you could host a website that would serve as a great fediverse alternative to Facebook.”
deleted by creator
Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.
I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”
I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.
“We were talking about the Middle East, and he took a piece of paper and he drew on it [a] map of the Middle East with all the nations on it, which most Americans couldn’t do,” he told the right-wing broadcaster.
haha yeah and Kim Jong-il bowled a perfect 300 game at his very first try at bowling, scored 11 holes-in-one on his very first try at playing golf, wrote over 1,500 books while at university, composed 6 operas, could walk at 3 weeks of age and speak at 8 weeks of age.
If you have ever had a dream where you can’t get something right. Like, in your dream you know you need to do something - you even know exactly what it is that you need to do. You have no excuse for not doing it - maybe you actually try to do it - and yet you keep finding it is as yet undone.
You eventually wake up, because you are alive and you are dreaming. But if you are dead, you are not alive, you cannot wake up. You have all of the agency that you had when you were dreaming, which is none. Until you woke up - you were helpless in your dream, try as you might. The dead are helpless in their dream as well, but they do not have the luxury of waking up.
So have some pity for the dead.
Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.
Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.
Now if only they could do the same with the stock market. But the conspiracy theorist in me believes that all this manipulation is being done hand in hand with certain arms of the government in order to maintain the government’s appearance of solvency and to control inflation in the face of what appears to be nearly unlimited spending. Just keep moving around fake money using a million different utterly opaque methods.
And boy it sounds expensive.