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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The company was sold shortly after, so maybe animals can sense their pending extinction (some of them anyway)?

    More likely the changes were made to improve the “saleability” of the website.

    I miss those days when writing an answer genuinely felt like helping to grow the global community of friend developers.

    One of the promises of the internet was, supposedly, that it couldn’t really be monopolized because the barriers to entry were so low. But what we’ve seen is the influence of the Networking Effect as a means of consolidating user bases, combined with a cartel-style censorship that limits the degree to which word-of-mouth can influence a nascent community’s growth.

    And now the AI comes to fully alienate us from each other, leaving even the more token communities with a “am I talking to a real person or a computer facsimile” lingering dread with each passing year.



  • Let’s for a second assume it is a mental illness, how does that make the people feel who are experiencing it? Do they feel loved and understood?

    “Hate the sin, love the sinner” has been the historical approach far-right evangelicals use to gull parents into conversation therapy for their kids.

    Conservatives have adopted much of the same liberalish compassionate language up top and horrifyingly brutal physical, emotional, and sexual abuse on the back end for drug rehabilitation and prison reform.

    The American idea of love and understanding is to brainwash them into compliance with social norms, while insisting the torture they’re inflicting is a kindness.











  • the logical thing to do is whatever gets the most people on the site the fastest

    With over 2.1 billion (with a B) active users, they’ve saturated the market. The game now is to avoid regulatory constraints and to maximize revenue per-user, which means degrading the experience in pursuit of the most lucrative individual users.

    It does have everything to do with maximizing profits for those in charge of running the Facebook show, though. Then it makes perfect sense to align the company with whatever political regime can promise the most bloody money for the new yacht and underage ‘entertainment’.

    A big part of the Facebook model is predicated on national surveillance paying them for access to their data. That’s what gives the 2.1B active users real tangible value - they’re subjects of surveillance. Sucking up to the people who cut the national security checks is a necessary part of that model.

    Also, I genuinely think the Zuck gets off on being a slimy little cunt

    I’m sure plenty of folks on Facebook do. But Zuck himself seems to have largely checked out, not unlike billionaires like Bezos and Gates, now that he’s got more money than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes. He’s off living his best life with his unlimited financial resources, and only pops in to make announcements like this as an investor celebrity.



  • They are pretty explicit in their mission to sow discord and disinformation maximize profits and minimize costs

    With Trumpism taking over the federal government wholesale, there’s little reason to even pretend to cater to the minority party. Unless there’s a shift during the midterms, of course. Then Zuck will rediscover religion and insist the content on his site needs to be moderated by liberals again.

    But its all just patronage. These moderation jobs are either soul-sucking gig work or no-show positions for the local professional political leadership. The work isn’t a profit center so it only exists as a means of assuaging regulators or cultivating cronies. Facebook’s real work is in harvesting data for Nat.Sec and gulling suckers with ads. Nothing else matters.





  • Is it because teens can’t afford booze, cigarettes, and drugs anymore?

    Per the article:

    The decrease in drug usage during the pandemic was somewhat of a surprise to experts. With the lockdowns causing depression rates to rise dramatically, an increase in drugs and drinking wouldn’t have been too much of a shock. But as the biggest factor in drug use for young people is peer pressure, the lockdowns had the opposite effect.

    “Drug use, particularly among adolescents, is typically a social event,” said Miech. “The social distancing policies during the pandemic were designed so that all teenagers and adolescents hardly interacted with anybody except their own immediate family.”

    The continuing decline of teen drug, alcohol and tobacco usage is a positive sign that these industries no longer have the power they once did over the country’s youth. But a disturbing trend in pop culture shows that cigarettes could be sneakily making a comeback.

    “I too see more and more smoking in the media and on these different shows I watch with my teenage daughter,” said Miech. “But fortunately, so far, it hasn’t actually translated into higher levels of cigarette smoking among adolescence.”