Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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Super not enthused with how centrist this is. Comes off as more of the "can't we all just get along and live in unity??" stuff people say, when really they mean "the left needs to chill and stop making everything a big deal."
Kinda hard to just 'get along' when the other side is trying to destroy democracy and strip large portions of the population of their basic human rights.
I mostly agree with you.
But I also think it's important to think of the neighbors we disagree with very differently than how we view right wing politicians and corporate executives. Our neighbors may have some shitty opinions and ignorant positions, but they might be decent people at heart. No right wing politician or billionaire CEO is going to be decent at heart.
I'm not sure where you live, but living/growing up in the south.... I can tell you that those beliefs run deep. Deep deep deep. Deeper than you can fix by just being pleasant to your neighbor.
If you try to talk to them with kindness and openness, they dig in their heels and start spewing fox news talking points like it's the most obvious thing in the world (I'm pretty sure they like it so much because it confirms every awful belief they already had). Try to present different sources, they're rejected as fake news. I've tried everything with people around here since before 2016 and nothing seems to help. Mostly I just keep to myself.
Living in the south, if you're not indoctrinated, is very isolating. Even living in the cities doesn't really help. You still need to dig deep and look carefully for people who don't think you deserve fewer rights.
Edit: thinking about it more, I think the isolation is the point, and it's how so many people in my state believe some of the same basic things when it comes to religion and politics. You learn pretty young around here that if you don't get with the program, you're not going to have many friends. If you didn't go to church, especially, you lost out on most of the community's socializing for the week. It feels very cliquey in the smaller towns especially, almost by design.
It seems that americans think the entire world is the american south. Generally in more civilised places outside of the U.S, people care less about other people's beliefs.
I definitely don't? I was just providing my experience for the place I live. Obviously not all places are the south...? And good for you on your 'more civilized place', but we're not talking about those areas.
Seems to me that, to solve rent crisis, Americans should just move into Europeans' heads, since we seem to live there rent free already.
I think that was a stab at you saying "living in the south" as if it automatically meant south of the USA. So your US-centric world view shines through. I think no one wanted to attack your world view per se, but rather your bias.
And regarding your second comment, why so passive-aggressive? Obviously the US lives in everyone's head rent free because it messes around with the whole world. Don't get offended by people trying to point out that there is more in the world than one single country.
I get that, I live in the south of my country too, but only the US feels entitled enough to say "the south" and expect the whole world to know where they are.
I live in a third world country, what they're saying is mostly accurate here too. Entire world isn't Europe
People who want to destroy democracy are influenced by their brain too. But they do react more extremely than others.
The thesis here is consistent with people believing political violence is justified, with human brain's tendency to form a "us vs them" mentality. But it doesn't explain why some act more extreme and violently.
People react differently because of multiple factors, such as living through different circumstances, different cultures, being more or less subject to cognitive biases, seing more or less misinformation, ... For instance if you see more misinformation about polical adversary being evil, AND your biases and culture makes you more likely to believe it.
That isn't an excuse for any violence. Understanding these mechanisms may help prevent reduce violence or hate. That's a worthy goal even if some groups have a much greater responsibility for political violence.
There's a difference between violence never being desirable, and violence never being necessary. Calls for pacifism at all costs only serve those in power.
Many people live daily with violence being done to them and their communities, but are continually admonished against the wrong kinds of resistance...
Interesting video, makes a lot of sense. Just a couple of things to add:
In the old days of forums it's worth remembering that people on the internet had more in common with each other than they do today - i.e. generally they were people who were in to computers.
What really gets me down these days is the extremely low-effort of posting everywhere you go. I think that partly comes from the impersonal nature of online communication. Nobody knows who anyone is any more.
I agree it would be better to go back to independent message boards but it's a shame there's no "call to action" - it would be nice but how do we get people to do it? This is a popular YouTube channel, it would be great if it started some kind of ball rolling.
I was posting low effort messages on BBS's back in the 80s, and on the Usenet through the 90's. The tradition continues.
I remember being told off by a moderator in the 90s for not writing full-sentence replies. You can't even imagine that today. Of course back then, as the video touches on, if you didn't like the culture or policies of a forum you just moved to another one, there were no cries of "censorship" because you choose where you want to be.
But I think that makes a good point, in the past people could choose whether they wanted to go on a forum for serious discussion, or a different forum for more casual low-effort posting. These days all these different "posting cultures" are forced to be together and end up annoying each other.
I completely agree with your assessment especially with how most social media these days really dumbs down the entry level effort needed to participate in discussions.
And to your point, participating on a BBS (which usually requires a more specific interest and consequently a similar engagement level) will generally reward you with a community that is more civil, friendly and worth frequenting.
Eternal September
I'm starting to think that Kurzgesagt is either paid media and/or propaganda. I really liked their well researched approach. But this one is straight out in your face. They outright deny the filter bubble that each one of us have experienced firsthand on corporate social media - and then blame you for the ill effects. Also, if you look at the imagery - the emoticons and especially the thumbs up symbol, they are trying to invoke memories of specific social media. It feels very much like they're trying to garner sympathy for those antisocial-media.
BTW, this isn't the first time their motives have been called into question. They have in the past, taken money from bigphrama to paint them as benevolent superheroes.
I don't know why you would think they're paid media or propaganda. It's not like they've been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a "philanthropic" organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of "effective altruism," an ideology which functionally equates to "let's try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality," and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It's also not like they've been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.
Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s
Have you read the sources? They are below the video. If you have, does the video misrepresent what's in the sources?
You can find sources to justify any POV - there is no need to misrepresent anything. Something doesn't automatically become right just because there's a research paper on it. In fact, that is one of the tricks big companies use to mislead people and scuttle reforms. Look at the history of the tobacco industry, climate change, lead in gasoline, city planning and zoning, etc. There are countless examples.
What you say is true, but the internet bubble was also a paper. So if OP thinks that's right and the papers saying it doesn't exist are wrong, then I'd like to know why.
Simply having a "feeling" is as scientific as "god said so".
They've always been pretty transparent about that kind of thing though haven't they?
I don't think they're denying the filter bubble exists, just giving a different theory on why things have turned bad.
The video pretty concisely summarizes the latest scientific findings which say that the filter bubble does less to radicalize people than being confronted with opposing beliefs.
They squarely blame algorithms pushing anger for their role in that extremism though.
They haven't been completely honest about their funding and biases. Second, they are trying to say that it's human nature and not the filter bubble that's responsible for things going bad. But those are not independent things. The algorithms created the filter bubble because they are designed to exploit human nature in order to trap human attention. That filter bubble in turn affects human nature in a negative way to cause polarization.
They are correct in the current interpretation of the effects of social media. Recent research has absolutely been pointing away from filter bubbles being a thing.
Spoiler: It's an ad.
The video includes an ad near the end. Like most video on YouTube, its creator rely on sponsors. Unfortunately they also placed the same ad at the beginning of the description. It's kind of repulsive if the first thing you look at is the description.
I wish I could scrub or remove the ad from the description, but it's automatically imported and I don't see how to remove it.
The second half sounds a lot like an ad for Lemmy ^^
Algorithm-free solves a lot of problems.
Algorithm-free
I'm not sure you understand what an algorithm is. They're simply a sequence of steps you apply to get some end result, comparable to eg. a recipe in baking.
Lemmy still has multiple ways for you to choose how posts are sorted; "hot", "active", "new" etc. Each of those is an algorithmic sorting, and there's literally no other option except to have an algorithm that is used to determine which posts you see
edit: I think many people who think Lemmy is "algorithm-free" may mean that it has a transparent algorithm for post selection. It's still an algorithm, but we can all go look at source code and documentation to be able to know exactly how it works – with eg. Facebook the exact workings of the post sorting algorithm is secret
Hey they changed the thumbnail. It used to be a dude shouting "I hate you!" at a PC.
YouTube has this thing where you can set multiple thumbnails (it will show a different one every time YouTube displays it) and see which one gets the most clicks, then use that one.
The video is kind of interesting... yes, I remember those days, and yes, there was a lot less bickering and fighting online.
The bickering was dumber and less serious but there was plenty of it on the newsgroups lol.
New Kurtzgesagt video, a new opportunity to improve my filter bubble by blocking anyone who starts parroting factoids about their ties with the Gates Foundation 🤭 great day