I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
The issue is in order to do so, they will have to make themselves feel less important. These social platforms are designed for exploitation by offering users instant soapboxes, immediate gratification in the form of likes/views/comments, a false sense of connection, etc. This is a sliver of the sickness they’ve spread.
Goddammit, I think you just described my relationship with Lemmy.
I know you’re joking, but it made me think.
On platforms like Twitter I never felt seen. I felt like I was talking to myself for the 30 seconds I actually engaged with it (I never could stand the format or the interface really).
On Lemmy I do feel seen, because it’s so much smaller. I know people read what I write and I get way more feedback here than I’ve ever gotten since (maybe) 2010-era Reddit.
But important? Anyone who can use the Internet to make themselves feel important must have been a sociopath to begin with because as near as I can tell the Internet is a misery machine designed to make you feel like a dumbshit.
Come to think of it, that’s probably why I hate the entire concept of “influencers” and the human toilets who call themselves that.
Lemmy is a different kind of platform. Twitter wasn’t for me, but I never clicked with Mastodon either. Some people like the microblog format but I just never got it, or maybe I never worked out how to use it probably.
Mastadon and twatter (past tense) are popularity contests. And all that popularity you are building can be taken from you for an unpopular take, even if it’s just misunderstood. The lemmy/piefed style is egalitarian, your comments stand on their own, you can post regardless of how many followers you have people may see it.
For me it’s just the character limit.
I like reddit because people could write in paragraphs. Twitter never had any appeal to me because it could never be more than slogan-slinging and when i briefly used it it just seemed utterly stupid to be limited to like 10 words.
To be fair, Lemmy has a ton of really smart people that I learn a lot from too.
Wow happy to know my comments have been reaching people 🙂↕️
Lemmy is sufficient, and if we stay, it will grow, along with piefed.
Reddit was good too, and still is decent.
The important thing is that the communities that are good are generally small and the commenters actually know each other and that creates a lot of positive social pressure to act like a normal person.
You can be recognized and develop a reputation. For example, I recognized @pelespirit@sh.itjust.works from their community: Politics@sh.itjust.works. I recognize Kolanaki by his giant unicode character username. I see Ada from Blahj everywhere.
Because of this, I have a more human view of their personality and even when we disagree it’s way less likely to devolve into toxic social media slap fights because it’s a lot easier to give them the benefit of the doubt due to previous positive interactions.
I, honestly, think forum communities pre-Myspace were the peak social media experience
Upvoted to feed the habit.
I feel called out.
Here, please enjoy my upvote 😊
with the constant AI slop propaganda as well.
it used to be just for nice social bubbles
now it’s for political disinformation bubbles and the two cannot be untangled. users will not do it voluntarily
real identities and moderation in the form of fact checking are the only way on all social media
Id’ing everyone to what they say on social media is not the “only way,” it’s the path to ruin. Have fun with your palantir crafted social score being used against you pal. Such a shit take, no wonder we are where we are. And you are railing against propaganda too, the irony.
Yeah anonymity and pseudonymity have been stolen from us IRL in a lot of cases and we shouldn’t cede them online. We should also take them back irl. Go lie about who you are to someone you meet.
“Who, me, officer? I’m just captainlezbian@lemmy.world.”
How could they be less important.
I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purlose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.
On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.
I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.
Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.
As much as anyone may dislike it, it’s a form of private journalism, private opinion, and private art, and almost all the content itself is free speech. You have to regulate the medium as harmful, very specifically described functionality. What is not protected is stuff like infinite scrolling, but something like comments and voting are likely also protected as speech.
it’s a form of private journalism, private opinion, and private art
But without any of the liability hazard.
This is my issue: the big platforms having their cake and eating it. In one breath, they claim to be little open-platform garage startups that can’t possibly be responsible for the content of their users; they’re just a utility. They need protection from Congress. In another breath, they’re the stewards of generations and children, the only ones responsible enough to tame the internet’s criminality. All while making trillions.
They want to be “private content” protected from the government? Fine. Treat them like it, legally.
It’s difficult… We’re not very good at determining what is right and then enforcing it, so we have this weird hybrid system of semi-freedom with some exceptions, and sometimes the utility is responsible and sometimes the user and sometimes it’s free speech or protected art and sometimes it’s not protected speech and it’s not protected art.
Sometimes I think we should encode lessons we’ve learned as evil because they are clearly evil and bad for society, and to ban/prosecute them, but then I look at our world and you realize we can’t be trusted to encode the right things or properly follow through.
On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.
I don’t think so. She said she wants to make them unable to continue with their business like they did before, with regulations. Just not outright censorship, but instead go fight their data harvesting, decapitating their business strategy.
yeah, the root issue is on their business strategy, the brainrot is just the conclusion of several years spent on optimizing engagement
I think Mozilla’s controversial “Deplatforming is not enough” lays out a better strategy for “the algorithm” problem to me.
Having big tech be able to work in secret to pick anf choose what content isnt allowed and then being super charged by the state to do it for them as well just doesnt sit well with me
While I don’t disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn’t a technical issue but a financing one.
I’ve been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they’d be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it’s not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.
Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to “salary overhead” while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves… Honestly, I’m probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it’s just too perfect of a solution.
Too little too late. They’re right tho
They’ve both been irrelevant to me for years now.
Since this is Lemmy, I can’t tell if you’re talking Meta/X or EFF and Jon…
All of them lol, i used to watch jon stewart every night during the bush years but now under trump it’s just i dont need to hear it anymore been the same story since i was a little kid and now it’s less funny than ever how much worse trump is than even bush was
Yeah, I hear ya. I can’t watch Jon, Colbert, or any comedian really because it’s all too depressing. Before, you had this naive assumption that it’ll get fixed eventually. The “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, blah blah blah. I don’t know if Dr King knew just how long he was talking about.
Facebook and Twitter, it whatever they call themselves now that they’re having a midlife crisis.
Instead of a convertible, we get a lame attempt at a metaverse and VR goggles?
Turns out getting your news from entities that financially support fascism is a bad idea.
Give them a few more years and every site except big social media will be flagged as dangerous in your browser, like those without valid SSL certs are now.
Pushing SSL was probably the last big tech effort/push that actually benefited users. Sure it made self hosting a little harder, and probably consolidated some tracking behind bigger players, but overall end users did benefit.
Most of what I see now is purely for their benefit and users don’t benefit.
Yeah, rallying against SSL is a weird way to go about it. SSL is one of the biggest and most meaningful changes to come about as a result of the Snowden leaks. The leaks were literally what prompted http to shift towards https instead, because it shined a bright spotlight on how insecure http truly is.
In the short term, it made self-hosting more difficult. But nowadays, with things like nginx and Let’s Encrypt, enabling SSL on your self-hosted site is as simple as selecting a few drop-down boxes, pasting an API key, and automating a cert refresh.
The true “has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet” existential threat is when a company like Meta or Google becomes the authority for things like ID verification or SSO.
I’m not rallying against SSL. Just an example of browser warnings.
“has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet”
Add Cloudflare hosting everything to that list.
Cloudflare hosting everything
But it’s so cheeeeeep! My website (continuously hosted since 1996) used to cost me $15 per month, since I migrated it to Cloudfare they’re charging $0.01 ro $0.02 per month for the same hosting services - it’s been about 18 months now, I think - I just got last months “bill” - I now owe them $0.25, but they won’t charge me until it hits $1.00.
Free service? YOU are the product.
A big man in the middle attack service, operating in a hostile nation? What could go wrong?
Wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
We’re well on our way to being something in between North Korea and Russia. Maybe Hungary would be a good comparison.
I’m way ahead of you
I’m doing my part.
I’ve always done my part. Never understood twitter in the first place!
I tried to use it once to have status messages sent from my servers and got banned
Same here, never liked it much
Then she says Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm while he defends the openness of Reddit.
These are the experts…
🤦
Yeah it’s just follow the money, if a giant corporate entity owns it, it’s going to fuck you and leave you for dead without flinching. It’s really that simple, whether its mcdonalds verizon google geico paramount or any of the other large companies, youre a number on a spreadsheet and if you die they don’t even notice and they will sell you dogshit and leave a smiley face on the receipt. If you owe anything they send your account to collections and minimum wage workers will tell your family they have to pay the debts you left behind.
Fuck reddit Fuck spez
The value of social media lies is in it’s ability to change thoughts, opinions, and long-term behavior. The public underestimates how effective this technology is, especially when it comes to children. In the absence of regulations, these platforms can make people believe just about anything by exploiting perceived peer pressure.
People still use them? Why?
probably sunk cost (time invested, followers gained, networking) + real addiction (meta and x will try to trigger any emotion from you so you are invested in the platform) + accessibility (free or cheap access on mobile data with big providers)
Marketplace killed Craigslist because they’re actually halfway decent at detecting and removing scams. Basically the only redeeming feature
If we had proper anti-trust laws, Marketplace would have been a separate entity that could survive on its own, while the rest dies.
Craigslist is still limping along, it’s a smaller group of buyers but still has traction in some markets.
Gee, wonder Fediverse users, how is that even possible? /s
I agree with @wesker@lemmy.sdf.org in their comment. No one in real life is on twitter. Twitter is place that seems real because people on media convince themselves its real and give it substance.
No materially meaningful thing happens on twitter, and its perceived importance is a byproduct of media hyping it up.
Now meta… thats an altogether different beast. FB market place captured most of what used to happen on craiglist. Its how entire families organize and keep together.
In terms of analysis, I’m annoyed at Cohn here. This isn’t something we as individuals have control of. Her saying people individually have to make the difference is like saying you individually have to make the difference regarding climate change by making different choices, like recycling.
This isn’t something we as individuals have control of.
Absolute nonsense.
Oh its absolutely not though. And you thinking that, thats decades of propaganda operating on you. And it worked. It shifts the responsibly from those in positions power, who can make societal scale decisions, to those who have the least power, who can only change their individual behavior.
And its not an accidental thing as a mechanism for governments, corporations, etc… to use to shift blame. Its all very well established.
There’s no propaganda. Its very simple logic and reason. I’ve done it. There’s no reason you can’t too.
It doesn’t shift responsibility anywhere. For some reason society gets this ridiculous notion that there can be only 1 person or entity to blame for anything, when in reality that’s almost never the case. Platforms have the choice not to exploit their users, and the users have the choice to leave. Both are responsible for the way things are, and either party has the power to end it.
There’s no propaganda.
Of course there is no war in bah sing seh! How could I forget.
Individual choices are practically immaterial and have almost no impact on the outcomes societies endure. For all practical purposes, individual choice is meaningless. You doing or not doing something doesn’t mean shit, because you aren’t in a position of power over systems.
Yes…you are. Claiming you’re not is exactly the kind of attitude that perpetuates these monoliths and they thank you kindly for your service.
Ah yes. The pee-wee herman defense. How astute.
As long as you put the responsibility for outcomes on individuals and not systems and those with power over systems, you are doing their work for them.
I already told you that’s not what I’m doing. You need to read more carefully. I put the responsibility on the people responsible. All of them.
I get a lot of my business for my company from facebook marketplace and my facebook reviews. It enrages me that I have to use facebook to succeed, at least at this point in my business.
When I need to buy or sell anything for my farm activities, its pretty much the only game in town.
So Cohn did mention comprehensive privacy laws and the ability to leave platforms. These are absolutely things that need to happen.
However as an individual there are still things you can do. Cohn mentions Bluesky because it has no algorithm (except the “Discovery” feed). Cohn also mentions (in the video) Mastodon. And the truth is you don’t need to switch fully, just don’t only slurp down the concentrated hate machine(s).
Look at Lemmy. Reddit decided to be pricks and a bunch of individuals jumped over here to create what I think is a pretty good community. That doesn’t mean the problem is solved. That doesn’t mean Reddit isn’t still a problem. That doesn’t mean Lemmy is perfect. But that is a win and something individuals can do.
Additionally, those are things you can do now. You don’t need to wait for some law to be passed to fix things. You can make the move now. (While still advocating for laws to fix things.)
The point of the critique is that individuals have no power to make Twitter less important, or at least, not the audience of this show. Who she should be bringing that critique to is someone like Jon Stewart himself, not to Jon Stewart’s audience. And actually, Jon is a great example of someone who did exactly this, with his Crossfire video.
Jon didn’t go on Crossfire and tell Crossfire’s audience to stop engaging with the content. He went on Crossfire and told the people in power to stop. Broadly, if you are ever doing something where you are shifting responsibility from those in power, to those out of power, you are doing the job of the oppressor.
Literally, Lemmy does not matter whatsoever to reddit, and likewise, Mastodon does not matter whatsoever to Twitter. Those things do not matter. Moving to lemmy or mastadon might make you feel better, but it has made not one iota of difference to those platforms.
Regulation, changes from those in positions of power, those can make a meaningful difference. But its utterly disingenuous to put things that require systemic reform as “collective reform”. Its utterly bonkers, and shields those in power, who can make different decisions, from needing to do so.
Individuals can make accounts on the fediverse meaning they no longer exclusively rely on meta/twitter meaning meta/twitter becomes less important.
I get that a lot of people have all their family on facebook/twitter or whatever, or business page etc. but just make an account on mastodon too, now the fediverse becomes a more attractive place for everyone else.
I think it would be a mistake to paint those two courses of action as mutually exclusive categories.
Yes, governments need to regulate businesses and industry if we want to have a meaningful impact on climate change. Blaming the consumer and putting all the impetus for change on them is misguided at best and deliberate obfuscation in many cases. But that doesn’t mean consumers should feel no responsibility at all. If two companies offer different options, we should as consumers choose to support the company with the more ethical business practices.
Likewise, governments need to regulate big tech companies. But users switching to the fediverse are choosing to be part of the solution rather than the problem, and the more it grows the more it looks like a viable alternative for others who don’t care about the ethics of the platforms they’re supporting. And when FOSS platforms reach a critical mass, it will eat into the corporations’ bottom lines.
Governments need to hold corporations accountable and meaningfully regulate them, but effectively giving consumers license to do whatever they want even if that means supporting corporate tech, and pretending it ultimately doesn’t matter, is kind of defeatist. It’s like saying “Why should the workers go on strike? That’s the union’s job.”
I think we can manage to advance on both fronts at the same time if we really try, but if for a time we can only advance on one front, then we should hold the other on as best we can while we advance on the one we can. Cause the time may come when we have to hold that front, but are able to advance on the other.
But individuals do have power to make Twitter less important. Well, maybe not Twitter, just because it’s 95% bots, but social media companies are usually only valuable if they have users. There are people who depend on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram for their business but 99% of users absolutely do not need to use those services. The analogy with recycling and climate fall flat because it takes many orders of magnitude more effort to avoid most/all plastics/packaging/fossil fuels than it does to just avoid IG/FB/X. The biggest barriers to getting rid of these shit companies is 1) too many people don’t realize how awful they are 2) too many people just don’t give a shit and 3) too many people are addicted to the dopamine hits from these trash sites.
Seriously, just don’t use them. When you’re presented with something that tries to force you to use them, say “sorry, I don’t use Meta products, do you have another way for me to get [the pop-up dates, the invite, etc]”
at one time, Twitter was amazing
if you could catch the attention of someone you wanted and they replied, it was amazing
i found that moment a few times
talking to The artist you had wondered about for years answering the question you had
it was fucking special
and that is over. it is something that I am saddened by
Twatter sucked before musk bought it. The moderation was dishonest.
In terms of analysis, I’m annoyed at Cohn here. This isn’t something we as individuals have control of. Her saying people individually have to make the difference is like saying you individually have to make the difference regarding climate change by making different choices, like recycling.
I understood her differently. I understood that she advocated into making it possible to leave platforms, saying that it currently isn’t. She said the people are the victims here and often don’t have a choice.
People cannot leave platforms because each platform is like an isle, and leaving it means losing connections to other people. It that sense they are locked-in, by social pressure.
This is is a natural monopoly which, gives social media companies so much power and prevents newcomers (like the fediverse) from joining the market.
Making the current social media companies less important, for instance via privacy laws, means people can connect and stay connected to other people via other means. It makes it easier to just leave twitter or meta, if they don’t like it there. Instead of being peer pressured into right extreme politics, because the algorithm decided that it gets more engagement when surrounding thrm with nazis.
She made it clear that replacing an dictator with another dictator that censors differently is bad, so she made a point against bluesky and for Mastodon and the fediverse.
(Sadly ehe wasn’t given the opportunity to fully complete her arguments though.)
The only way I can see forward is regulation. Antitrust laws have been suspended for too long. They have to be enforced, and interoperable standards must be fiercely enforced, without loopholes, without exceptions. If leaving Facebook for another social media platform does not have to mean you’ll lose all your connections, thanks to interoperable standards, it will be easier for people to ditch them and harder for them to become monopolies.
Americans: No.
