I don’t think these corporations deliberately aimed their content at any age group.

1 hour later:

Wouldn’t doubt it if they did market to kids.

… you do realize you are a clown person, right?

Do you do this often, just a total 180 flip on your position, and then just move on as if that isn’t what happened?

And you go blathering on about some new thing that should be focused on, no acknowledgement that in about 1 hr of other people giving you basic, basic relevant facts to what you are claiming, that you are completely wrong?

You’re talking out your ass, you’re just saying things, having not the first clue what you are talking about.

Please, stop.

You are embarassing yourself.

I have not used Discord in years, but I guess it would depend on what exactly consitutes NSFW chat or content.

Like… how much just current modern news around Esptein can be discussed on a non NSFW rated discord community?

I genuienly don’t know.

Well theres also the near certainty that they’re reading everyones messages with some kind of LLM agent that is their ‘system that runs in the background’ that attempts to auto-determine if you are a kid or not.

Thats regardless of whether or not you also give them your ID or face.

And, if you have connected Discord to any other apps? Other apps that you maybe pay for things with? Or you pay for Nitro?

They know who you are.

No it isn’t.

Be a better parent.

Or, better yet: Don’t have kids you aren’t capable of raising properly.

If this all sounds too complicated, you aren’t a capable parent.

Ok, rare to see such an explicit kind of Great Filter / Idiot Test play out at scale, but here we go!

Anybody who is still using Discord after it requires you to personally directly link your drivers liscense or w/e to it, well, they’re fine with every government apparatus of any kind knowing everything they say and do on Discord.

Good luck to those glorious morons, truly, good luck.

You are going to need it.

Super, duper hope you’re not queer or trans or neurodivergent.

… you… think the 23 concentration camps currently being built by ICE / FEMA are … only for migrants?

Brown people?

Well you trust the current fascist regime a lot more than I do.

… but I like my tomaccos fried!

Option 3: Detonate a nuclear warhead in Arasaka HQ.

… it tastes like grandma.

Well they could and they did, but those people were delusional and paranoid, so, no need to pay them any mind.

It does very much annoy me that, yeah, its always been possible to do this.

I believe Claim A! Claim A deniers are bad, smell bad, and are probably also demons!

EDIT: Welp, looks like Claim A is dubious, thanks to user so and so for setting me straight, see their explanation below.

Yeah you have always been able to do that or something very close to it on basically every forum or social media type thing ever.

But… you are probably right that if you give people a mea culpa flag as a built in part of the UI/UX, that would almost certainly spur more people to do it.

… Its still terrifying to me that a large segment of people would need such a button to exist before they would be ok doing it.

I guess this isn’t a case where the sort of ‘desire path’ solution manifests and is then maybe formally adopted, seems like you’d have to basically social engineer humility into people.

I hate that this would probably work, in the sense that it isn’t just DUH obvious to everyone already that they don’t need a button specifically for this, but I also love that this would probably work.

I can imagine a ‘year end wrap up’ where you get to see all the stuff you said that you decided was stupid.

Then I guess just pair it with some kind of affirmative message of ‘hey, you’re trying to admit your mistakes, and that’s probably good’.

Its less deceptive than trying to delete shit dumb stuff, as… everyone can still see you did say it, but realized it was bad.

The version I originally heard was not that its like, completely 100% not real people and instead is some kind of bot or something like that, but just that its increasingly more and more proportional internet traffic is like that.

A couple of years ago there were a few reports about just how much traffic on the internet is some kind of automated web scraper, some kind of automated system pinging some other kind of automated system… and then also how many accounts on forums or reddit or twitch or whatnot were not ‘real’ accounts, but were either bots or paid trolls of some kind… vs genuine human traffic by actual people using the internet in some way.

I guess a bunch of people oversimplified that a bit to just fit into some kind of creepy pasta / simulation theory /solipsism type narrative.

But either way, now both scenarios are converging toward being more true at the same time, as… seemingly 90% of people are either easily transfixed or fooled by LLM produced content of some kind… and yeah, we are getting closer and closer to it being difficult to tell, on most popular platforms, whether you are engaging with a real person or not.

Also, agruably… the entire point of ‘the algorithm’ on any corpo social media, tiktok, insta, facebook, etc… the whole point of those has always been to piegeon hole each user into their own little curated content feedback loop, their own personal content/advertising pocket dimension.

I guess it just had to get more extreme for people to realize how bad this can be.

I mean, the only way Dead Internet Theory could ever possibly be interpreted was weird creepy and dystopian, but yes, we’re just making it much, much more real, faster and faster.

We’re gonna need the Blackwall from CP77 fairly soon, at this rate.

They can’t open source their code because then people would rather rapidly discover all the backdoors they’ve built in for various US LE and Intelligence agencies.

… genuinely, how can they possibly expect to regain or have any trust after turning W11 into a constant wiretap via Copilot, that spams ads all up in your OS in every place, and then also just handing over the bitlocker master keys to the FBI?

You would have to be very uninformed or delusional at this point to think that Windows and privacy/security exist in the same universe.

The only thing they have going for them is inertia.

And they’re now hitting the point where backlash against them is snowballing much faster than they could possibly reverse course on their own internal inertia and actually make any real changes.

And yes that applies to their consumer facing shit as well as B2B.

As far as I can tell, advertisement/profit-driven social media that is directly tied to your real identity might actually be the worst thing humanity has ever invented.

Oops!

Turns out we’re mostly vain and stupid, in our default state.

Now amplify.

Oh and as a bonus:

It serves as a kind of self perpetuating auto-panopticon.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people just record thems committing, planning to commit, bragging about committing, or admitting to commiting crimes that can put you away for 5 years plus… on fucking TikTok.

Hey wow its like I’ve been saying that for a decade, but because I’m poor and I say that, clearly I am some kind of antisocial insane person, not somebody who can read a bunch of existing studies and data and form a conclusion.

Corporation would never gaslight you!

… unless you deserved it.

“Walled garden initiates universal tollbooth policy overhaul.”

Kind of pretty important and relevant:

The main reason why this process isn’t “something for nothing” is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:

Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.

So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power the process of pulling gasoline out of the air.

Ok, see how that’s silly?

Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, then sure! That makes more sense.

Hate hyrdocarbon fuels all you want, they are very good at being dense, portable, and exist in the vast majority of pre-existing logistics infrastructure.

But the thing isn’t magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.

And… you’d probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.

I’m not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.

Appeal to hypocrisy and cowardice?

You think I’m arguing this… as rhetorically convincing way of…migrating people… to another … position?

We’re not on reddit. I don’t talk to redditors.

Because I think the vast majority of them are willing participants in a destructive and abusive system.

I’m not doing PR, I’m using a word to accurately the vast majority of such people in the situation you described.

I’m… not going to constantly police my speech to be some kind of maximally appealling and welcoming to everyone.

I say what I think.

If that upsets you, I don’t care, block me, please.

I’m not a politician trying to craft a maximally acceptable political message.

If you want that kind of social environment… go back to the reddit hivemind.

Go look again the OP image that spawned this entire conversation.

You’re gonna tell me that advertising for homocidal fascist goons, as a business model, is not abusive?

That an enshittifying platform that literally sold out so that a couple owners could extract even MORE money out of everyone around them… thats not abusive?

I’m sorry you have a problem with the word coward, but, I am using it correctly, in applying it to your scenario.

Yeah, all your points abouts about why its difficult to leave are valid, its complex when you go into detail, when you take it case by case.

But when you zoom out, and write a memoir or a summary about it… it boils down to, as I already said, either your values of not using an exploitative platform don’t exceed your need for using it, for whatever reason, or, you’re afraid of losing social connections or social standing.

People with strong ties to a reddit community and strong values and courage… could become leaders in trying to orchestrate or encourage an exodus or relocation.

Yeah, rocking the boat to get people’s attention is harder than pretending it isn’t sinking.