This is what Democrats need. For the younger generations to be the adults in the room. It’s been time for it a over a decade ago. They should have been preparing lines of succession during the Obama era.

I refer to it as the social graph. When a site starts using metadata to map how users are related on a social platform. And then implementing features based on that. It’s not a buzzword but that’s the technical root that stems everything that makes an enshittified Facebookified site.

Unfortunately when reddit started becoming a social graph based site, the technical literacy of the user base also plummet. So nobody knew wtf a graph structure is.

The popular feed for Canada became voat. The far right subreddits are the top posts every single day.

It’s a rich peoples game. Those with mere pittance to invest will not end up with much even if they live a very long natural life and do not touch a penny of whatever they could invest until their death bed. Even then they’ve have to wait until the very end for that pittance. The whole thing is based on having a enough wealth such that small percentage returns equate to a lot in absolute value. A small or even larger than average percentage return from relatively little wealth is still very little.

To change any of this would be to change the underlying issues of unequal distribution of wealth. The stock markets are derivative. If more had wealth then obviously they’d be investing more. It’s not the other way around.

Some believe they can cheat code their way to the other side by gambling which is not investing. Seems to have become popular again in recent times after certain cultural phenomenons. That again does not change underlying issues. A few lottery winners and many more silent losers only serves to amplify inequality.

Why does this have to be a two sides thing? Is this underpinned by the culture war bullshit? I can’t tell and I can’t be assed to deep dive into every spat to untangle all the reading between the lines.

I’m surprised they found that there is no evidence that using these platforms is “rewiring” children’s brains. Wasn’t it shown that social media companies base pretty much their entire technical decision making on psychologically conditioning not just children’s brains but everyone who uses it? So the evidence now shows that these are benign after all? Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Huffman never had us trapped in infinite scroll fine tuning the knobs to keep us teetering on the brink? There’s some discrepancy here.

I don’t see what the divide is anyways. Social media is all about things like violence, structural discrimination, sexual abuse, substance abuse. It’s odd the book author is saying these are non-issues. Seems like he is taking a rather shallow view.

Also teenagers have been using the broader definition of social media for decades.

There is a fascinating cognitive bias where people seem to think because we live in current times it means that history can’t happen to us.

It doesn’t help that discourse online is entirely convinced that everything was absolutely perfect for the baby boomer generation. They never experienced hardship. Nope. Absolutely none. If they did it was no where near 1000 times how bad I have it.

We forgot for a while because the zeitgeist went back to the geopolitics of “Russia and China bad”.

I hadn’t learned enough about how to use it back then.

Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.

It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.

Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.

Battlefield Earth. I saw a schlocky sci-fi movie. The internet has since informed me it’s the modern Birth of a Nation or something.

There’s only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.

Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.

I used message boards well into the 2010s. Digg and reddit were a curiosity that I mostly lurked.

I remember I got downvoted on Digg for anecdote about how the climate had been changing over the years in my area. The comments in those types of posts were primarily deniers saying there wasn’t scientific evidence of climate change.

I make throwaway accounts. Push code. Disappear forever. Come to find out nobody ever looks at it anyways.

Did many other students commute too? I went to a commuter school. There wasn’t much student life. People mostly went to class and went home.

Nobody really indexes those types of sites anymore. I suppose a lot of those site operators are more than happy to remain separate from the big tech net.

I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don’t approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That’s when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.

There’s more shoreline to spare.

Time to stake a nice beach front property on Hudson’s Bay. It will replace become the new summer destination after Florida has completely submerged to the ocean.

How are their internet boards looking? I’ve noticed a kind of weird way to tell what’s going on on the street is to observe actions of the population. Brazil has a very high youth unemployment. Most of the edge lord NEET boards are full of Brazilian kids.