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.
A spooky thing I noticed at one point I could search a rather vague query and Google was returning results in the programming language I was working with when the query was general enough to have been any language.
What has reddit accomplished in over a decade? That place has been nothing more than an escalating demoralization psy-op. It's given the right another central platform to push their ideologies. It's had the left preoccupied with petty squabbles.
Maybe reddit closer to 15-20 years ago would have been able to use reddit to stage actual coordinated worker demonstrations in cities around America. Over the past decade or so they've been keyboard mashing.
The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn't possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It's quite clear by now there's faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I'd put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.
A president in jail would be disastrous for the reputation of America as a country. That's been my theory as to why he will never face any real consequence. It seems like an elephant in the room. One that probably doesn't even split neatly down partisanship.
They already have their own x86 chips. They're a few generations behind the cutting edge. They've been catching up fast which is why the US and EU have been shitting their pants trying to wage cold war. All of a sudden ramping up the China bad narrative out of left field when not long ago they were trying to work with China rather than against them..
Much of the manufacturing difficulty we hear about with western industry is achieving highest yields possible of the most powerful chips to please ravenous shareholders demanding flawless profit gains every quarter. Capitalism problems in other words. It's much different when your goal is merely to produce computers for government office use. You can still use old computers for the majority of computing needs.
The average person makes under 100k even in reddits favorite high cost of living tech hubs where their six figures is pretty much makes them equivalent to the people on skidrow. It's amusing how when they were struggling college students the bar for rich was millionaires. Those who've made it rich themselves the bar for rich person moved up to billionaires. So now they have to wax philosophic, "what exactly is 'rich'?". You got rich. There being richer people than you doesn't change that.
Explain the same executive compensation minus tech and people will have their pitchforks out. But it's tech so which has a different set of standards because it's the internets darling.
The writings been on the all for a long time. Public trackers are as good as dead. People have held on to a cocky attitude that there will always be somebody to take up the mantle but that hasn't been true in so long. Anti-piracy has been winning by war of attrition.
The interest in bittorrent usage has been on a gradual decline for good decade at least. Try looking for some recent shows these days and you'll be hard pressed to find many seeders for even popular ones. You'll still be able to download it eventually but it's a long way down from the heyday when obscure content was highly available.
These days everyone has streaming subscriptions or is logging in with someones account. The dwindling number of torrenters will download and watch relatively soon after release. Then the torrent dies real quick.
I'm pretty sure to much of the younger generations piracy means getting content from pirate streaming sites more than anything. The decline of PC usage has got to be a big factor too. There just isn't anymore nerd culture of your PC being your main device much less leaving it running 24/7 with a torrent client. I bet soon enough as gen alpha comes of age, bittorrent will be a forgotten technology of the ancients.
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.
I think I've comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.
spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That's if reddit inc isn't being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.
The calamity of another great war may not be nuclear weapons but weaponized ad tech. Maybe then will the average person comprehend the gravity of the situation we live in right now. Maybe it will be so horrifying that no conventional weapon of mass destruction would be needed to cause a digital dark age as people throw away these privacy nightmare devices.
I don't think this is going to tank like everyone says. Those that hold that opinion are too heavily basing this on personal feelings toward the platform. Reddit isn't geared toward those individuals anymore. They successfully pivot the platform towards the broad swath of social media users. The market will be pricing reddit based on this. Not whether or not you personally think it's still a site worth using. The more opinionated geek crowd was never profitable and reddit inc doesn't care about them.
At this point social media users have grown so weary of their main platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Enough to have mass adopted reddit especially during the pandemic years. Reddit has been capitalizing on that to give people something that seems fresh to them. For all your own years of baggage you personally hold over reddit, the broad market of social media users do not care. They just want their big multi-forum app to entertain them.
The market will not price reddit based on your personal idpol issues with the site. Of which everybody across the spectrum seems to have some sort of stick up their ass. Reddit has survived all those "reddit moments" over the past decades. The platform has actually proven incredibly resilient. The nature of reddit is that it isn't any common identity anyone can point to really. There is so much representation across the board. Users hate other parts of reddit rather than reddit itself.
The big social platforms have consolidated power over the internet. There's no competitors. reddit being the forgotten stepchild is having its time in the spotlight right now. The fediverse ecosystem is too raw and too technical for the casual user right now.
The company basically has to keep mods placated to keep on keeping the lights on. They did survive the API protest. I think to them that was actually a litmus test for the IPO. So far we have seen there is no shortage of sycophants lined up. Subreddits are valuable and there has been and will always be those who want to be internet feudal lord.
A lot of people do take issue with reddit but overall the userbase they are selling, that broad social media userbase, they did not care about such issues as the API whatever gabagool. They don't even know what an aye pee eye is. They just wanted their app to go back to normal. And it did. And reddit resumed operation as normal.
You're assuming your own country is impervious to climate change. It's the dirty poors bringing their problems to you, right? How dare they.