Not to be rude, but how was it not already at max? I feel like there’s some kind of shared amnesia around here, as if Meta hasn’t proven to the world hundreds of times over how terrible they are. It is genuinely baffling to see so many people act like they aren’t a tumor on the internet and the world in general.

Unless you want content and more people to interact with.

Like, people keep saying “oh yeah you can jump instances” as if that wasn’t possible on Reddit. You could go to different subs or make your own. But what good were most of them? As long as there’s a “default”, a main “hub”, people will go there, and that’s where everything will be happening. The alternatives and smaller instances will be starved out.

Centralization is not about the software, it’s about the people. Users centralize where others are. So when the big hubs are allowing threads to poison the well, it’s poisoning the thing most people want to drink from, and the thing new visitors will be most likely to drink from.

Threads represents something that a lot of people came to the fetiverse to escape. If threads wants to join, fine, but I believe it is in the best interest of all of us if there is a large alternative “cluster” that is separate from it rather than being tied up with it.

A separate galaxy in the fediverse, that says in big red neon lights, “Get your corporate bullshit away from us. This is our space, for people, not for you to make money.” And if we let them in immediately, it becomes increasingly difficult for that galaxy to retain that identity.

And I’ll just gently point out that once Threads joins, separating from it will not be easy because you will have Threads users here actively pushing back on the separation.

How is that different from Reddit? If trolls want to search and scrape and find information on people, they’re going to. You can’t put your information on the open Internet and not appreciate there’s always a danger of that.

Can you imagine spending that much money on a car where this is even possible?

Seriously, don’t ever buy a car that can have something uninstalled remotely without your consent. I can’t believe we’ve sunk this far.

Everything about Reddit’s most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.

That’s the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It’s not just Google’s shitty algorithm, it’s also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.

That’s what gave it value.

Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That’s why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That’s why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.

But the time came to make money, and they’re burning it all down to accomplish that.

I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:

Stop talking to each other and start buying things

It’s not just about ads, it’s about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform’s collapse over time. it’s enshitification, yes, but it’s also something else: “dehumanation”. The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.

Actually I think they’re just renaming it to “Twitter”

See, the fact you think the IQ tests matters in any way means your uniformed about it, which comes back to the topic at hand.

IQ tests are bullshit; it’s been proven many times.

Yet you were told they weren’t. And that informed how you think.

I could call you stupid for bringing up an IQ test.

Or I could accept that people not having all the knowledge in the world is just part of being human, and that there are many things you know that I probably don’t.

They don’t period.

George Carlin did an incredible job making a certain type of person believe being a nihilistic asshole was the height of wisdom.

You, of course, are firmly in that 10%, I assume.

Nothing does quite so good a job revealing how highly they think of themselves as sharing that Carlin quote. It’s the clarian call of the faux intellectual.

Reasoning is based on knowledge. There have to be things you accept as truths first before you can start reasoning, and those truths are not universally shared, nor do they have the same weight for everyone. That includes you and me.

There are things we don’t “know”, and things we don’t know that we don’t know, but we nevertheless think of ourselves as informed and capable of reasoning. To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about looking down on those that don’t know things you know and declaring them less-than.

The basic point is there are countless factors big and small that influence any individual’s thoughts and ideas at any given moment. Our minds are very complex things, and our lives are messy, absorbing all kinds of information and stimuli that affect it in ways we don’t properly understand or even realize.

When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.

And there’s a lot of dark history behind this, too. The history of psychology is riffe with falsehoods about quantifying intelligence, and often it was simply about prejudice.

You want to call people stupid for doing stupid things, sure, I get that. I do that. We all do. But the more you try to create these general arguments about human stupidity, the more it unravels, and the more it reveals about you.

Children have been living in homes for quite a while, I don’t see why we suddenly need constant surveillance on them now.

Then don’t hire them?

The problem is cameras like these, the kind that people are putting up inside their own homes, facing their living spaces, their own damn bedrooms, they’re sold to people that have this desire to be able to check in with those cameras remotely at any time, without a good reason.

The only reason my mother seems to have crap like this set up is so she can see the dogs when she’s not home. They’re just sleeping.

Internet connected, living space directed cameras are this bizarre consumer electronics trend that has no legitimate use case for like 90% of the people that rush to use it. Certainly not one that merits the security risks and the privacy invasion that they are inviting on themselves.

Maybe, but the difference is a lot more people are going to be looking to target the cloud provider than your home network. To say nothing of the fact that your videos on the cloud are subject to the terms and services that you agree to and those terms can be changed at any time. And also the fact that you can’t guarantee that the stuff you delete off of that server is actually being deleted.

Also, quit putting unnecessary, Internet connected cameras indoors.

I seriously cannot fathom the amount of people that seem to want to put cameras up in their own bedrooms and just let them stream video constantly.

It has nothing to do with any serious home security, and everything to do with mindless consumerism. Hopefully it’s a trend that will pass.

Well, from the perspective of the shareholders, you’re doing everything right if you’re making more money. And sadly, not enough people push back on this sort of thing to make it not profitable.

Sometimes, I see some of the takes on here, and it’s hardly surprising that the fediverse isn’t particularly popular.

You genuinely think the reason the fediverse isn’t popular is because people have negative opinions of Spotify? As if these opinions wouldn’t also be prevalent on Reddit? As if having to see opinions you didn’t agree with was ever holding reddit back to begin with?

And yeah, Spotify made music streaming accessible, but the overall problem is they did what all tech companies at the time did: burned money to establish themselves hoping the profit would come later.

You’re praising them for killing iTunes, but maybe iTunes didn’t need to be killed. Maybe breaking markets with a type of streaming that wasn’t profitable and fucked over artists has given us a few years of good streaming, but the honeymoon is coming to an end, and we’ll all be worse off when the stockholders start demanding profit.

Same thing that happened with YouTube, basically. Company runs something at a loss for so long they’ve effectively broken the market and now that it’s time to make money, we’re all fucked over.

lol, funny thing is that this isn’t really a story about ice cream machines - anyone who’s seen melted mcds ice cream foam knows that ain’t ice cream.

It’s funny people think this is some sort of secret. It’s right in the name of the product: soft-serve.

That’s what soft-serve is. Basically a bastardized form of ice-cream mixed with air to make it soft and add volume. The mix is often extended with stuff like CMC, but that’s hardly unique to McDonald’s.

The formulation of the mix at McDonald’s is probably just “extended” more than you might find at other places, but the fact it’s “foam” is hardly the scandal.