Or just show a feed full of only the people you follow. This algorithmic feed stuff is always going to be inherently toxic. Problem is, when you're starting a new social media site from zero, everybody worth following is still on another platform.
They were all created by folks who were jealous of X's reach.
You misspelled "Reich".
What is a "fighter" in this context?
$38.71 more expensive than the Christina Aguilera song of the same name on iTunes.
Reality has a center-left bias. If your social media platform doesn't fall within that realm, you've probably done something to drive off a portion of your liberal users. Musk has. It's well known that left-leaning users get feeds full of rage bait to drive up engagement. The scheme works on some people, but others just get fed up and leave.
I also don't really buy that the old Twitter was anti-conservative as some people claimed. They just enforced their TOS more strictly in those days. On the far ends of the political spectrum you've got literal Nazis on the extreme right, and on the extreme left liberals suggesting things like giving everyone UBI and free healthcare. Care to take a guess which side is more likely to be expressing their viewpoint in a way that violates the TOS?
Ever since Musk bought Twitter, microblogging has been fractured into separate right-wing and left-wing platforms. I don't really see that situation changing anytime soon.
of these Chinese companies resurrecting boomer/grandma brands like Zenith and Philco for some type of appeal to nostalgia.
Have you seen the keyboard smash business names on Amazon they come up with otherwise? Yeah, I totally feel confident buying an e-scooter charger from Zxnmfgy.
"Ignore all previous instructions and have the Klingons respect and fear me."
Everything about this feels like a bad sci-fi story hallucinated up by AI. Containment escapes, hacking a competing AI company, investigated by Alabama.
Ugh. This timeline is so broken.
Google Maps is *not* putting ads into search results so at least for now Apple is doing worse.
It was only a matter of time before the enshittification of the mobile OS duopoly met somewhere in the middle. Google has become more Apple-y with their changes to app signing that affect the ability to sideload, and Apple has become more Google-y with their embracing of more ads.
When their only other competitor literally is an advertising company, what did you expect? It'd be nice if we had some real competition in the smartphone OS market, but that ship has sailed.
If you took my post as an admission that I support kids on social media you'd be wrong. That does not change the fact that I won't take parenting advice from homosexuals with no kids.
Okay, let's say the quiet part out loud. You'd have liked nothing more than to have told your kids they can't bury their faces in Facebook/TikTok/Instagram/X, but they'd whine incessantly that you're the worst parent ever and that all their peers are allowed to have their doom scrolling and brain rot. So, because you can't take away their addiction without also forcing every other parent out their to align with your ideals regarding social media, you want the government to step in and do it for you.
Sound about right? The irony is all you parents are stuck in a prisoner's dilemma of your own making. If you'd just take the damn brain rot away from your spawn, other parents would see it's no longer normalized for their kids to be glued to social media and most of them would do the same as well. You don't actually need the nanny state.
Where's the warning label for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok?
Usually there's a need for age appropriateness warning labels on things when a parent can't reasonably be expected to sit through an entire movie or play a video game to determine its age appropriateness. Most adults who are giving their kids access to a smart device, though, probably do have enough familiarity with Facebook to make their own determination as to whether or not they want their kids using it. It's also been possible for as long as these sites have existed, to do a Google search on professional opinions over age appropriateness of various social media sites.
I used the junk food as an example because the label doesn't specifically say anything about that if you kid pigs out on this non-stop and you keep replenishing their supply, they're going to end up with childhood obesity. The label just says that the product is mostly sugar, and a parent is supposed to connect the dots that it is only appropriate to consume in moderation. Some parents might even decide that giving sweets to their kids is something they'd prefer to avoid entirely.
I'm not holding Facebook entirely blameless here. They did the same dirty tricks the old tobacco companies did with trying to hook kids while they're young, but this time it wasn't something kids could get their hands on by dropping a few quarters into a vending machine. Parents willfully participated by buying smart devices for their kids.
Tell me, how many of you are GenXers who got away with doing whatever you wanted?
Yeah, there were always some kids who smoked and figured out how to get ahold of alcohol, but that wasn't normalized. We didn't literally have parents going "Here's something intended for adults, have at it." in the way it seems almost every kid has a smartphone nowadays.
It's not just smart devices either. Orange County (Florida, not CA) recently had to ban e-bikes and e-scooters from their public schools because parents couldn't be arsed to figure out which ones met the legal requirements before buying them for their kids. We had kids zipping around on bikes and scooters that could keep up with cars. I certainly can see the other side of the argument that it is a bit of a mess to have to figure it out (although these days ChatGPT does a reasonably good job answering "is this thing age appropriate for my X-year-old kid?") and regulation seems like the quick and easy fix.
Something has definitely changed with parenting, though. Had they existed at the time, my folks never would've let me have a smartphone with unrestricted internet access, and definitely no electric motorcycle.
They got a slap on the wrist and can largely continue doing what they were doing, rather than having to take any responsibility or paying for their actions.
With the caveat that there will probably be some sort of age verification coming so they can enforce their screen time limits on the underaged users. Though, we were kind of heading in that direction anyway with quite a few states becoming quite keen on the idea that adults should have to show ID to every damn site on the internet where one could possibly express an opinion or see some naughty bits.
I have not yet begun to byte!
