Kinda what I meant by plastics

I’m more worried about the plastic, pesticides, degraded pharmaceuticals and heavy metals myself

Here’s the thing - we’ve been raised from birth to think “people don’t make things, companies do”.

Most people have never used software that isn’t company branded, they’ve never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they’ve never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

It’s learned helplessness. They don’t have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they’ve tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball… Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you’re just trying to exercise?

This time around, I didn’t bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

And this is just the beginning, it’s going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it’s going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

I think it’s important to remember we’re animals, and we’re not just trainable, we’re the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

It’s going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they’re going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

I’m working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I’ve got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

I’ve been at it for 30 hours now, but I can’t shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows

My theory? It’s Musk.

He’s going around saying he only lost bots and scammers, that he’s made Twitter profitable, and that advertisers are back and happier than ever

He isn’t showing his numbers and there’s no way his claims are true, but he’s saying what they all want to hear. “Don’t worry guys, you can squeeze your users for cash hard as you want, and they might grumble about it but they’ll soon come crawling back”

There’s also increased pressure to become profitable ASAP, much of it is likely due to the economy, but Musk lying through his teeth is probably getting to the other billionaires. It’s worth mentioning, if you’re a billionaire the only reason to still care about money is for bragging rights

You underestimate the power of addiction.

The official app isn’t a bad thing because it’s buggy and has ads, that sucks but I’ve used much worse apps that offer less. The amount of ads and how easy they are to click accidentally is ridiculous though

It’s bad because it’s built to do what Facebook did - it always gives you something to see and a reason to keep going. Have a nice, curated mix of science and shit posts? Let’s throw some crap from the front page in there along with the ads! No one responded to your comments? We’ll make suggestions look like someone is interacting with you! Haven’t used the app in a few hours? Here’s some posts delivered in a notification to get you back in there

I left Facebook for Reddit because I realized I didn’t really enjoy it and often ended up feeling worse after using, and when the experiments they were doing came out I payed close attention. It was a real slap in the face when I saw Reddit doing similar stuff, and I checked out alternatives like tildes but nothing else was scratching the itch so I put it on the back burner.

For those of us who aren’t going back, this wakeup call was a blessing. It’s a strong reminder that corporations not only don’t care about us, they can’t - they might act friendly sometimes, but they wouldn’t hesitate to poison the water supply if they thought it would bring greater profits

I like the game grumps and Lex Fridman. The documentaries are cool, but I have to watch them in a different container or YouTube will start feeding me 30 minute ads or rants that sound reasonable but are super bigoted and flawed when you actually think about it

Reddit meant more to me than anything else I do online, and I committed to leaving it behind even before I found Lemmy… YouTube is barely worth it even without the ads. And I’ve got a whole fediverse of video content to investigate

That’s the advice CorgySkog gave them lol

Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise

I liked GTA V, but I spent my whole time with rdr2 just being like “everyone loves this game, what am I missing? Maybe if I make it to the next act it’ll open up more”.

It was beautiful, the world felt alive, the mechanics were good, but it’s like instead of making a game with the wonderful foundation they built, they decided they’d rather tell a story than make a game.

I loved the hunting, the bounty quests were kind of ok, the gunfights were ok even if they were so repetitive they felt procedural, but I just couldn’t care about the story they shoved down your throat.

I wanted to build up the settlement and have to run around robbing trains to come up with money, I don’t want to do a 5 minute ride while the characters give exposition through dialogue, fight a few waves of enemies, then ride off - rinse and repeat.

I wanted to grind progression through upgrading weapons and gear, but the upgrades are minimal, new guns are linked to story progression, and while hunting was fun the legendaries were just tedious jumping through hoops

I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.

As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php

So there’s plenty you’re leaving out there, like the fact he didn’t start spaceX or Tesla (although he sued the founders to not mention that publicly), and the Hyperloop is a great sci-fi idea that the math just doesn’t work out on (at least not in Earth’s atmosphere)

It totally supports what you’re saying, the only credit he deserves is as a hype man and for securing government assistance. Nothing he says or does convinces me he’s a smart or even slightly self-aware person, but…

Not a day after I posted, musk announced he wanted to remove blocking people on Twitter. That’s an idea a 7 year old could tell you is dumb.

Sure, the presence of the mute makes the platform worse rather than unusual, but still, holy hell Batman…

I agree with what you said, and the evidence supports you. But here’s where a very small part of me drifts to…

Let’s say he’s been trying a zero requiem since the beginning. He’s measurably advanced key technologies. He’s positioned himself to have the ear of very powerful people. He’s gained the respect of many of them for growing his wealth to become one of the richest people in existence. They listen to his methods if nothing else.

Now he tanks Twitter in a very public, blundering way. He expressed privately (in now public text exchanges) an interest in getting together a bunch of rich people to buy out social media, because it’s an possibly existential risk.

For those watching critically, it certainly looks like he plans to use Twitter to turn money into influence over the population. He keeps insisting moves that are killing Twitter have actually made them profitable. Other social media, like Reddit and discord, took notice and started flirting with these user-hostile ideas.

The most likely result is social media platforms splintering their user bases as they flee elsewhere, while the billionaire held up as an example of why billionaires are actually a good thing becomes hated by large portions of the population (particularly on the left, the side more critical of billionaires and capitalism)

Again, I think you’re probably right. I believe he’s just a spoiled asshole who read sci-fi and dreamed of being Tony Stark. I’m also deeply concerned about how he started getting political after meeting Trump.

But if he’s actually doing it all on purpose to become the symbol of a billionaire that needs to be reigned in, it would probably look a lot like what we’re seeing

Well first off, I like to write essays too, and I really have been enjoying the fact people here are way more willing to engage in longer posts.

I think you’re into something with how humans empathize (kind of interesting to me my first response when someone tells me about an conflict is to try to reconstruct the other person’s perspective). I think there’s definitely a lot to the way people think less critically the more emotional they get

But to round it all off, smaller communities help, but really it’s a matter of self-reinforcing social structures and the ways that social network mechanisms interact with them.

Outrage is the strongest driver for participation - so posts that incite the most outrage will get far more votes and replies in either direction. The outraged position will be far more likely to vote, while people who don’t feel as strongly are less likely to do so to the same extent. That skews the metrics most algorithms use to rank them, and so they get more visibility.

As this goes on, the group will shift - the outraged people only need to be a fraction of the group to seem like they’re the majority, and people put off by it are more than likely going to leave what looks like a total echo chamber (especially if people get nasty or personal)

The outraged group also starts to feel like their position is actually the average of the group (e.g. the silent majority), and they might shift even further, becoming more extreme - as people’s beliefs are relative to their perception of social norms.

This cycle repeats until it becomes so polarized a moderate opinion is seen as extreme, and might be attacked.

It’s a difficult problem to solve - the only easy metrics are going to be votes, comments, and maybe if people stay or leave after viewing. There’s more complex systems that might work - such as using ai to score additional metrics based on content, or (an idea bouncing around in the back of my head for a while) by profiling the users to try to boost consensus opinions to compete with “outrageous” ones. Obviously, this is way more computationally expensive and requires complex code that few will be in a position to understand (even if it were open source). These strategies could also be used to drive engagement or ad conversation at the expense of mental health (something that seems to be at least explored by some social media companies)

But small groups help in a very simple way -only so much media fits on a page. Even if the top comments are pure outrage porn, the other voices won’t be buried

The other solution is moderation (it’s in the name) - effective moderation of the tone and “rules of engagement” can tamp things down. But people generally don’t like to be censored, and it doesn’t scale - moderators are individuals, and too much to go through or dividing it up between larger groups of mods strips the nuance out of the process

My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through

He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?

I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.

Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?

I generally dislike them, but do you really see them enough to bother? My dad texts them to me sometimes, but in general I rarely see them (outside of tongue in cheek usages, like mojo using 🔥 as a file extension)

What you’re describing is polarization within a community transforming it into an echo chamber, driving out much of the community. Sure, truechildfree formed out of people who still wanted a community based around that aspect of themselves, but they’re not the reason for the split - they’re a symptom. For every user that made the journey to truechildfree, there’s probably 3-10 that just unsubbed, and another 5 that just stopped participating

My personal example is AITA. It started off as a group judgement based on the morality of the situation, but in the last few years people have become obsessed with “rights”. I actually got tempbanned for a situation where a douche told a woman that by joining trivia night in a small town bar she was ruining guys night. I responded to someone saying “IDK why your bf wasn’t happy about how you handled it”, and I basically said “yeah, he’s the asshole, but clearly this is extremely important to him, and saying screw you I have every right to be here while he storms out didn’t just ruin his night, it soured the evening for his friends who tried to stop him. That’s not going to make you any friends in your new town, and a little compassion could’ve diffused the situation”. It’s hard to put into words (and that’s just the most salient example, I probably got more negative karma there than everywhere else put together), but the community moved from what’s the right thing to do into what’s your legal rights

As far as I know, there’s no trueAITA - the community just morphed into something I find toxic. The nuance was gone, and it became something very different to the sub I loved participating in. I almost unsubbed, but instead I mostly just would start writing a comment before deleting it and moving on.

I think fractured, smaller communities help with this more than anything. Humans generally adjust their morality based on their peers - and the bigger the community, the more the loudest voices begin to feel like they’re expressing the opinion of the majority.

If 10% of a large community upvotes a certain viewpoint, it takes all of the top slots. It’s a weakness of the popularity-based ranking system - a relatively small voting block easily dominates the discussion. The moderates just ignore it, because they disagree but not enough to actually fight it out

But force people together in a smaller, more diverse group, and they moderate each other. The trick is, you can’t do it through polarization - you can’t fragment a community based on beliefs or you get echo chambers.

You just have to throw people together and make them talk it out. Opinions naturally balance towards the mean when the groups are smaller, and the most cohesive voices dominate when the group becomes large

Sure, because YouTube was bought by Google - their investors already cashed out, so they no longer have the same pressure to grow at all costs

It’s because investors don’t care about profits - they care about the promise of profit growth.

You could make an investment, and normal valuation is like 3-5 years to break even. But if you’re rich already, breaking even does nothing for you - what you care about is what the value of your share of the company is worth in 5-10 years.

They’d rather risk it all and push for 100x ROI - anything from 0-5x is basically the same for them. Only exponential growth will matter for them financially, so at every turn they’ll push for you to take on more debt and reinvest everything in the hopes you become the Google (or get bought by them)

Because we have an absurd monetary system.

Companies also need to “grow or die”, the capital holders don’t want to invest in a sustainable company that turns reliable profits - they want line curve up

Reddit probably took on loans and additional investments to push towards growth plans, like the website redesign or marketing. They might’ve bought fancy office space to look the part, and bought big booths at conventions.

And maybe it all even worked - but the pressure is always going to be “take more loans and try to grow even faster” - not “pay off the principal so your monthly payments go down”. After all, if you double in size, paying off the loan would be trivial

Except the way our systems are set up, you have to keep growing until you can’t - at that point, you pop and deflate into a shell of what you were

That’s the one thing I’ll miss completely. I’m really into consent, and girls posting just to show off does something that porn alone doesn’t

Maybe Lemmy will get there, but I’ve seen nothing like that so far

Well on the plus side, it pushed me over the edge to start making the first 3rd party client.

What do you think of the name flemmy?