this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Its because all the old people who dont even know the basics of computers are finally catching up thanks to social media.
Not that its a bad thing. I just wish that social media is held accountable for scams and bullying cuz they have the authority to do something about it.
No, it's algorithms. They prioritise retention and everything else gets tossed onto that fire. Decency, mental health, reality, it doesn't matter. The machine will stochastically find every weakness in human psychology and exploit it.
And that is driven by business decisions. Facebook in Myanmar was the de facto internet because they'd subsidised it so they would have a monopoly. They knew that they needed to implement native language filters to deal with bigotry that was becoming rampant on the platform because their algorithm was finding that bigotry and amplifying it. But they noticed that when they turned on those filters, their revenue went down, so they disabled them. That decision is fairly credibly implicated in the genocide that followed.
Smartphones have been a disaster for the internet.
Barrier to entry is not a bad thing.