I was blocked from posting relevant content to a dead group that was struggling to achieve member interaction. They made me do about 10 captchas to prove I’m not a robot. They blocked my account. It was a huge favor. I don’t miss the site.
On the flip side of that scenario, anyone who was actually interested in what I was posting in that group now has nothing to read. On any given site, I would estimate that more than 90% of the users visiting and reading the content are not interacting. Only a small percent of the users are doing anything to inspire the general population to visit the site. To me it’s idiotic to punish people who are contributing positive and constructive content. By doing so, you are giving hundreds of people one less reason to visit the site.
Users abandoning the platform is the only logical outcome when your algorithms punish/ban/discourage positive & useful interaction.
If I stood by Mark Zuckerburg 24 hours a day and wrote down everything he did, he’d be calling the police on me. This is exactly what he’s doing to Facebook users, he’s just doing it more deceptively. I consider his platform to be unethical and committing illegal activities remotely. Regardless of Capitalism being the motive, the act itself is already considered to be illegal offline. Why would people feel that it’s okay online?
He failed miserably. Pending bankruptcy is not success. DARPA succeeded by funding him until he got a product that could make money. DARPA is the U.S. government. It’s me and other taxpayers. All the money he makes now is because the government spent money cushioning his fall so that he could survive. He’s just a face propped up to represent American technology.
I agree, and if it’s underground, accessibility has to be considered over and above pressurization. It’s more suitable for freight transport than it is moving people. It has to be earthquake-proof in some regions. Logistically, I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s fun in concept because it makes us think we’re stepping into the future, but there are better visions for our future than a pressurized tube.
I think technology is more reliable than the people in our lives and we migrate towards reliability. This makes people even less reliable than the technology around us and it feeds a cycle that isolates us from others. The people who design the technology then manipulate their products to make them more addictive and feed what we respond to.
I have never felt regret over making one choice over another. My regrets in life is that the options I had to choose between were never acceptable to me from the beginning. Life is sometimes a process of choosing between the lesser of two evils. I would not describe myself as lonely, but if I was lonely, it’d definitely be because i chose to be lonely over some other option.
It happens all the time. People don’t innovate from scratch. They take designs that work and tweak them for improvements. Eventually those improvements get repurposed for something else. The first mining truck inverter we built was just a tweaked and repurposed locomotive inverter. The last mining truck we built before handing of that product to another facility was the world’s first all electric mining truck.
I think it’s supposed to be more efficient, not just fast. I worked with a guy who helped design Maglev trains for China. With my limited knowledge, I’d think that a train floating above a track with no friction and being propelled by a magnetic wave has more potential that a train in a tube. I’m not familiar with the power and technology it takes to create that magnetic wave, but I still think it has more potential. I should have asked how the wave was created, but I was too amazed that the technology even existed.
It wasn’t big. It was smaller than most. Thankfully it didn’t hurt very much. I’m not into the commercial aspect of Christmas, so I discourage people from buying me gifts. It’s amazing how much stress it removes from your life to simply boycott the practice of buying, wrapping, and exchanging gifts.
I meant to say that allowing comments is a selling point or promotional aspect because it keeps users engaged and give them a reason to come back. They have a reason to revisit the blog, see new posts, and comment on old posts. Having run a message board for over 20 years, I’ve observed that when people visit without posting something back, the quicker traffic dries up to almost nothing.
The usenet was essentially public email without all the HTML baggage. You searched for a group that interested you on public news servers. You subscribed to it and immediately interacted with people who shared your interests. The groups had a moderator to keep things on track. Typically, moderation was not a problem and I didn’t even know who the moderator was. Deja news archived the old posts and you could follow old threads to know what had been written before. Eventually, spam overtook the groups and it was too much to avoid. There were pay services, but most ISP’s had a news server and you could just follow the public groups for free.
I do very little to entice subscribers to follow me and I manually delete old posts after I felt people had time to review them and comment. I don’t want 20 years of my life online. People grow and change over time. Despite that general tendency, I’ve grown followers on Pixelfed at a faster rate than I have on most Social media sites. One person said my posts were filling up his feed and that’s why he hadn’t followed my account. That’s another reason I feel that following someone should not dump everything into your main feed. Following someone should just make it easier to access their posts. It should force it to be seen.
My song playlists had themes if I listened to one. I’ve owned a lot of albums that were 50% great songs and 50% duds. I do listen to albums if I know the album is consistent throughout.
I do like the complete randomness of Mastodon, but I have a huge blocklist that probably ties up a lot of system resources in the background. Misskey is very interesting, but I feel that some of it is broken and some of it is not very intuitive (such as expanding a thread.)
My biggest problem with social media is that if I follow someone, I’m not interested in seeing everything that everyone posts in my feed. I want to be able to select the users separately and view their specific posts when I’m in the mood. I don’t want everything jumbled together. I usually don’t follow anyone and just click on their profile instead. That’s disheartening to the people who do post things that interest me. I’m looking forward to pixelfed introducing groups. Being old school in my tastes , I prefered the old usenet format better and using a feed reader. Spam (& google) ruined the old usenet format.
I’m not entirely sure that social media sites should be considered the biggest risk. CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks) can track you all across the internet. Mastodon was using a CDN. I contend that the https is designed to authenticate the correctness of the metadata sites are collecting on you and not to make your daily browsing more secure.
In 1998, someone did a finger search on the email server I was using and it returned my personal info. The lack of privacy at the time horrified me. I started a website dedicated to privacy. That attracted visits from every branch of the Federal govt. It also attracted stalkers trying to negate what I was advocating. I keep multiple layers between my online activities. You’d be amazed at how persistent people can be to silence you for having a difference in opinion to them. The layers don’t give me more privacy, but they do shine a spotlight on stalkers. One anonymous email provider posted on his site… If you plan on doing anything illegal, be aware that the FBI visited him daily and he was on a first name basis with the agents.
I guess they think people care.