It is getting more difficult to research now. Increasingly I just grab the source code locally and don't bother with the browser. Every search returns pages of wordy AI generated docs. At best they restate the code. At worse they read like badly written brochures. I am avoiding any project that doesn't have a long history. Large, feature packed projects that appeared out of nowhere on github with a single commit with no history or users are essentially stolen code that has been machine translated to obscure the original authors works.
I hate becoming the old person shaking their fist at the sky but the AI bros have just gone too far. I don't know why there isn't a bigger political and social movement against them. I would sign up in an instant to see their companies and practices regulated out of existence.
We are a playful species. People enjoy play. If we didn't have to work for a living but still enjoyed food security that is all most of us would do. But we are also a very exploitative species, some more than others. Companies have made billions of dollars on top of Fabrice Bellard's works, qemu, ffmpeg etc.
These companies don't have any imagination. Their management has no vision. They could not create anything new and wonderful if they tried. People like Fabrice do and we are all richer for it. If your asking about the practical use you are likely in the exploitative mindset which is understandable on HN. The hacker/geek mindset enjoys this for what it is.
There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part.
There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A lot of the novelty of mobile, streaming, social media and weird tech nobody needs has worn off and the value has been eroded. There are so many better things to do and experience and you don't need to hand over your privacy or sign your soul away.
> It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago.
It also often turns out that when some new way comes along to do something that people like to do, the ways they used to do those things go away. If you don't like the new way you can't go back to how it used to be done.
The last physical media video rental store within a reasonable drive of me closed around 8 years ago. Redbox went away in 2024. There is still rental by mail, but that is slow.
Those who liked being able to be able to rent a movie without planning days ahead are stuck with streaming now.
Another example is cell phones. It used to be that there were pay phones all over the place. Nearly every public place had a payphone nearby. In most cities there was a good chance there was a street payphone on every block, and nearly every restaurant and gas station had one. On freeways there were call boxes to summon help.
Pay phones peaked in the US in 1995. When cell phones went mainstream in the early to mid 2000s, pay phones rapidly went away, and in about 10 years were almost all gone. Around 90% of freeway call boxes also disappeared. They now are mostly only in areas with poor cellular coverage.
If you want to be able to make calls while out and about now doing it the way it was done before cell phones quite likely is not feasible.
> Those who liked being able to be able to rent a movie without planning days ahead are stuck with streaming now.
Just want to point out that public libraries often have great DVD collections (also music, games, and more) and are often underutilized. Definitely still a viable way to watch a movie for many folks.
Perhaps this makes a very big difference to you, but I often have to remind myself that iTunes movie rentals are very much alive and function just as they do some ten years ago. No subscription required. Not physical, sure, but a normal rental experience.
it's interesting that if you want to watch a movie, torrenting is pretty much the same it was 20 years ago. at this point I torrent movies that are on Netflix (that I have a subscription for) simply because it gets me a better bitrate much more reliably.
While not exactly the same as freeway call boxes... pretty much every state requires any business that are listed on the food/gas/hotel/recreation signs for off ramps to have a free phone for public use.
Every single ToS is written to benefit the company, and when necessary, harm the consumer. The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Use open source software. Control when your software updates. Really, never use the cloud version of anything whatsoever except where unavoidable. (eg: email and such)
They feel like the legal equivalent of Calvin Ball. So long as you just stash it in a ToS, you can apply any stupid rule your lawyers can imagine.
> Right? A “contract” that only one party needs to abide by is not a contract… it’s an abusive relationship.
I think you're absolutely right morally, but I think you've made a pretty important technical error: they're not abusive because "only one party needs to abide...by the contract", they're abusive because only one party can unilaterally change the deal. The companies that make these "contracts" can actually follow them, but since they can change them at a whim, it only really binds the other party.
Wonder how a court would treat it if users just reply to the email updating the terms of service on our behalf and claiming that they have accepted the terms by not doing anything. (Eg add stringent PII protection, no tracking requirements…)
My guess is that you would probably get kicked off the service if anyone reads your TOS, so make sure to add onerous cancellation charges due to the user in your updated TOS.
I could imagine an AI sidekick that does all this work for you, and always has the last word because it'll never give up.
A place like Meta or Microsoft would tell you to pound sand, but an aligned army of collective-bargaining agents might succeed in removing a specific term from a smaller service.
There are plenty of other abusive aspects besides the fact that they can be changed unilaterally.
What I really don't understand is how it's supposed to be a fundamental part of contract law that there's a "meeting of the minds" where both parties agree to the same thing, and there are these click-through agreements that nobody reads, and everybody knows that nobody reads them, but they're still enforceable. I get why there needs to be a general presumption that you've actually read a contract that you've signed, otherwise you'd be flooded with people saying "actually I didn't read that" to get out of contracts they don't like anymore. But that presumption doesn't make any sense when one party doesn't read the contract, the other party knows nobody reads it, and everybody knows nobody reads it, but we all just sort of pretend.
I particularly love the pretend play of software forcing you to scroll the dozens of pages of contract text all the way to the bottom before the Accept button is enabled. Because obviously the reason I didn't read through the entirety of these eulas before is because I wasn't sure of how scrolling works.
The only way they should be enforceable is if they use that scrolling trick, then quiz you on all the terms (with at least multiple choice), every time the TOS is updated.
Despite sounding absurd I think that would actually work really well. It would make it functionally impossible to include arcane BS without driving off customers while also filtering out people too stupid to be trusted with any sort of online account.
I'm reminded of Mitch Hedberg's bit about getting a receipt when buying a donut. "I don't need a receipt for the donut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut. End of transaction!"
Why do we need massive TOS for stuff? I'll just give you the money, and you give me the service. End of transaction!
Presumably because an ongoing service isn't a clean exchange of physical goods. It's more analogous to a gym membership which definitely does come with a contract.
By eating this donut you agree that we are not responsible for any health problems that might result, either directly or indirectly.
But generally the ToS has few, if any, requirements for the company. Usually the ToS is just a list of demands they make of the user in exchange for the service. But the company usually reserves the right to terminate service for any reason, as well as change the serice in any way they want, and change the terms of the "contract" at any time.
Ok that's no way to build a functional society, though. Humans are certainly not the entities in this conflict with the time or resources to go to court.
>If the company violates their ToS, you can take them to court (or arbitration).
This is my favorite...how exactly can I monitor compliance? No evidence of non-compliance - get tossed out of court. No court order for discovery - no ability to monitor/gather evidence compliance.
The idea that this is even a potential for mutuallity on a TOS is just farcical.
Often I see a popup to accept TOS after the update, which was run without me agreeing to anything.
At which time the company has unilaterally denied my access to something I already paid for without seeking my affirmative consent.
In theory I could stop whatever I'm doing, go email the company a brief to the point letter indicating they've broken their ToS and are unacceptably impairing my ability to use my property under the contract that I did agree to, and giving them an opportunity to amend their problem and give me a rollback path.
Realistically the outcome of this is a brushoff and needing to file a consumer protection complaint or get a lawyer.
If the feature is something like "my car" I can't afford that opportunity cost and am coerced into accepting their contract by the way they presented the amended terms.
I figure ToS for physical devices should be blanket outlawed. They're fraught enough for purely online services. Physical devices keep all of that baggage then add additional questions about whether or not I own physical objects that I purchased.
You think that's bad? Imagine being unironically held accountable to the unenumerated terms of a "social contract" that you never even signed or had a right to refuse in the first place.
The difference is that a social contract is a concept and not literal contract.
The actual reality behind "the social contract" is simply that people have the capability to act in ways that can and do affect other people. Because of this, most people find that it's beneficial to moderate our actions in relation to other people based on their preferences.
I'm referring to very real obligations that we are all held to under the justification of "the social contract" such as taxation and being drafted into military service, not social niceties.
We are held to these obligations as seriously and as legally as we are held to real contracts, but unlike the bedrock that constitutes the basis for the legitimacy of all real contracts, these obligations are imposed upon us with no opportunity for consideration, consent, or rejection.
>The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible.
Any contract where the other party performs so little seeking of my agreement (none at all really) that no representative talks to me in person or even electronically in an individual capacity, where no one witnesses me put my mark on the paper or hears by verbal assent, is in fact no contract at all. Despite what the courts may say. Should they say otherwise, they're wholly illegitimate.
That any of you have let something else stand as the norm is bizarre and alarming. Contracts require explicit, sought agreement, by their very definition. Nothing can be implied. If their business model relies on implicit agreement because anything else would be too difficult, then they simply shouldn't be allowed to remain in business.
1. By reading the message that referred you to this page ("randomstring.org/~dsr/eula.html") you agree, on behalf of yourself and your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that you believe I have entered into with you or your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges.
2. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
I wonder if appending something like this to the user agent string could work in court as a justification.
"Your Honour, the plaintiff's webserver engine thoroughly accepted my client's cookie which expressly stated the waiver of terms brought forward, and continued to serve requested content instead of stopping or refusing further interactions."
This is somewhat fair, but only as long as you agree that you then have no right to use these services.
I think there is a big difference between the EULA that comes attached to a product you've already paid for, that represents additional terms to what you had already agreed to when paying, and the T&C of a free service or a subscription, presented before payment.
You can't seriously claim that you have a right to use, say, YouTube without any restriction whatsoever. It is a private service, and you can either use it under the terms and conditions that its private owner establishes, or you can avoid using it at all.
Absolutely, but that's a completely different claim than what GP was saying. They were saying that there is no binding agreement that you enter to just by using a product that has T&Cs shown on the screen.
Isn't that a bit extreme? As a counterpoint, I find it useful to be able to pay for a train journey by tapping my card on an electronic reader - no representative of the company is there or otherwise witnesses me doing so - but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. And I do want it to be a contract, because the transport company agrees to get me to my destination somehow even if the trains are cancelled. Perhaps the conditions of carriage may be somehow unsatisfactory to me, but the way in which I enter into the contract is almost entirely unrelated.
There is well established case law on the contract that forms when you buy something from a store (say with cash). There is a contract, on implied terms . I think what we’re talking about here is entering into a contract (or not) on explicit terms dictated by one party where the other party has not explicitly considered them and barely given the opportunity to do so if at all. I don’t think anybody is denying the ability of contracts coming into existence on implied terms.
>but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location.
I'm not sure why you drape this in the clothing of "legal contract". If the train fails to take you to your destination, they certainly aren't in breach. It seems really one-sided. Why do they need it to be a contract? Will you come and claw back the fare from them with them having no legal recourse?
In the UK, where I live, it's completely usual to treat this as a contractual obligation. If there's a problem which means the train can't take you there, the operating company will do everything reasonable to achieve the offered service, exactly because otherwise they'd be in breach.
Example: there are a series of scheduled trains from London (St Pancras) to Nottingham. One day maintenance works meant the line would partly close overnight and the last train would run very slow. Since tickets were already sold the company intended to get passengers to Nottingham by Taxi, reasoning that few would take this already slow train and so a coach hire or other arrangement weren't cost effective.
Unfortunately an unavoidable incident elsewhere meant instead of a half dozen sleepy passengers arriving at the blocked line and being allocated a few taxis, hundreds of us turned up on that last train. The employee paid to order taxis made a few calls and was told too bad, the company will just have to eat the cost of hundreds of taxi fares, call all the city's taxi firms.
Not the whole London to Nottingham, just the last maybe 20-30 minutes from where the line was blocked overnight for works. And they obviously do often charter buses, in fact my local train operator was a bus company as well so their buses got used for this type of event because it's just internal accounting. However in the example I gave above that operating company had chosen not to hire a larger vehicle because they anticipated low volume. Six taxis is probably cheaper than a coach. A hundred not so much.
They had bad luck, a different train hit a person (almost certainly a suicide, it is possible to get struck by accident but it's not common) and delayed a large amount of passengers like me who were going to London to get that Nottingham train, people delayed by that incident from their last-but-one train [which ran normally all the way to Nottingham] filled this slow, train that couldn't get all the way instead. A really smart organized team in St Pancras could have realised way too many people are boarding that last train and warned their colleagues, but realistically it was probably already too late to organise a better response even if somehow an incredibly joined-up organisation had reacted to the problem.
The reason for that phrase is that no, Mother Nature's laws are all that matters, unlike our puny laws, hers are inherent properties of the universe, no need for enforcement because you literally can't break them. A court can insist that up is down, but it ain't.
They come into relevance about the time the phrase "despite what the courts may say" was uttered. The intent behind the phrase "you can pry it from my cold dead hands" is roughly the same.
Of course I think that armed revolution over ToS is utterly laughable. But I'm merely answering your question.
For an example of a situation the phase actually applies to, consider "despite what the courts may say we are removing the flock cameras".
As an avid reader and outdoors enthusiast, I feel there’s a lot of value on “wasting” time with a movie or limited series.
Absolutely, there are so many better things to do and experience than watching TV, but no one should be stressing out about maximizing their time doing them.
In fact, going against that mindset once in a while, and allowing yourself to not do the thing you think you should be doing, is an experience by itself.
Also, it doesn’t need to be a complete waste of time. If you like history or art, there’s a lot of content both as fiction and non fiction that you would find intellectually stimulating (I highly recommend Criterion for this)
One cold November night my wife picked a movie called
Babette's Feast. I absolutely loved the photography. I did some research and found it was inspired by Danish painter Hammershoi, which I never heard of. For Christmas, my wife gave me a beautifully printed, limited edition of his work by the Jacquemart museum in Paris.
Later this year we plan to make a stop in Copenhagen on our way to Sweden to visit friends, so we can see Hammershoi work at the museums.
Seriously you can have a very pure experience interacting with media. I did a mushroom trip ~5 years ago and was having a not great time walking around outside. Cars, other people, sun, bugs etc. were all not sitting right. I went home and watched "Life in Colour", an Attenborough documentary about amazing uses of color in animals. It was a top experience and I still remember scenes from it years later.
Anyway don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and all that, there is a reason we developed digital entertainment.
Wasted time should not be defined as unproductive time, it should be time you did not experience, time you were completely clocked out, not even enjoyed, not relaxed or relished. Wasted. It is a subtle difference but critical to remember if you want to reclaim your time rather than claiming it for capitalism.
I don’t live in US or five eyes so I pirate all the stuff basically Scot free.
I understand that it’s not so easy for Americans whose internet activity is constantly scrutinized. I’ve had the privilege of choosing exactly who and what I pay.
I usually don’t subscribe to any streaming service, but when I do choose to pay for something, my money goes to smaller entities that I don’t actively want to see fail.
In my book, none of the Hollywood deserves a single cent. It’s an amazing feeling to be in the power to dictate this.
>In my book, none of the Hollywood deserves a single cent. It’s an amazing feeling to be in the power to dictate this.
Then you don't consume it...you boycott it. Freeloading on honest consumers isn't some kind of moral high ground. If Hollywood is corrupt and full of shitheads, letting someone else pay for your ticket doesn't make you a morally pure viewer.
It's fine if you just own that you don't want to pay for what you consume. But don't try and paint yourself like some kind of saint, lol
The whole concept of intellectual property rights is a social and legal construct designed to promote innovation in an economy. If you don't care about that, then there really isn't any moral or immoral aspect to it. The immorality of it and associating it with stealing was just MPAA propaganda to try to shame people into paying for stuff.
If I found some DVD lying on the ground and watched it and I didn't pay for it, it's really up to me to decide if I want to pay the creator so they can continue to produce content. If I don't pay then obviously it doesn't help them produce more content... but the consumption of the content itself neither felt nor heard by the creators.
The bedrock of the argument is that you give for what you take. This is very fundamental, not just some capitalist drivel. You'd be hard pressed to find a single level headed individual who could form a coherent argument against it (generally speaking, not just protracted edge cases). Even your most hippie communist commune requires giving in order to receive.
People act (many even think) like this doesn't apply to digital goods, since copying has no material cost. But producing that digital good costs time and money (anyone on HN care to disagree?). So then you have to decide who are the ones who pay and who are the ones who get free copies. Conveniently, everyone who is getting a free copy thinks that they have a rightful stake to it for free. And because nothing is actually free (see the first line), the ones paying are the ones also covering the cost for those who get is free.
I wouldn't expect teenagers to grasp this, after all we were the teenagers who devised this "piracy as a moral crusade" back in the 90's/00's (how convenient that a side effect of this moral crusade was all the free content your dead broke ass could imagine). But now, if you are in your 30's or older and still haven't logic'ed this out, it's time to catch up.
Simple: people who want it to exist can fund its creation. People who are indifferent or don't want it to exist can choose not to, and once it exists, there's obviously no moral question either way. We already have lifetimes of media available. It costs nothing to replicate infinitely. Do we need to specifically incentivize more?
I think the world would also be a lot better off if software could all be freely distributed and if warranty law required software sales to come with source as well. If you need the computer to do something, you pay a programmer to make it so. You or that programmer can then share the solution with others. The goal is to solve more problems and build a wealthier society for our children, not create rent extraction machines.
Likewise with things like the textbook racket. The government should just commission updates for k-12 books (including AP, so basic uni) every ~15 years or so. Most of this stuff is not changing. It should be "done".
> But producing that digital good costs time and money (anyone on HN care to disagree?)
Not disagree, but it is more nuanced than this I think. I spend a fair amount of money going to movie theaters, usually independent movie theaters but sometimes big ones, to see new releases. As I understand it, the production and funding model relies almost entirely on the box office numbers. I think when dealing with older releases, the waters are much murkier.
I end up seeing new things in person and paying a huge premium to do so. I won't pretend I do it for moral reasons or even strictly to support the creators (although I do it in part to support the independent theater itself). It does keep me from feeling bad for also running a media server, on which maybe 1% of the content is newer than 5 years old, though.
I have almost never bought a physical copy of a movie -- and in my mind the IP holders are usually terrible curators of their own content. Physical media is provided in a horribly limited and anti-consumer format, tied to ephemeral standards and technology and often embedded with advertisements and few subtitle options. Digital products are, somehow, worse. Tied to a walled garden, with no true 'ownership', sometimes platforms like Amazon video will even make their own edits to movies, removing crucial parts for no apparent reason (the wicker man, avatar) and without marking it as abridged. They often make decisions that scream 'cash grab' (i.e. years ago when TNG came on netflix, I went to stream it and was shocked at the potato quality. Later re-releases were released in an un-cropped widescreen that included things like boom mikes because of the original intended aspect ratio of the show.) DRM is a nightmare. The product I want -- a file containing the media and only the media, which I can view however I want without logging into anybody's servers -- does not exist. And if it did exist, well, I do also take issue with paying full price for a file of a 40 year old movie, for example. I know there are costs associated with remasters, etc, but most of these are not remasters (and those costs are also much much lower than outright movie production).
A notable exception is outfits like Vinagar Syndrome, who as a labor of love dig up lost media and often re-cut or remaster / distribute it, and due to the low scale and lack of demand likely do not make much if any profit off it. I often do see showings of Vinegar Syndrome releases at my indie theater though or rent them from the one remaining video rental place (I'm unsure whether or not that benefits the production company).
It probably gets more hairy for people who watch a lot of new serialized media, which I do not.
I kind of wish people would think critically about the gradient of potential consumption habits when making their media choices rather than separating into pro / anti piracy stances, because it's an interesting and multi-faceted topic with a lot of considerations to be made.
I don't consume it because it's crap, but IMO someone who doesn't give money to Disney (a company that pushes gambling on people and is a major reason our copyright laws are broken in the first place) is more moral than someone who does, and the downloading itself is amoral. So if you're going to watch it, might as well pirate.
Any $10/mo VPN solves this, and probably advertises it as a selling point.
Of course, then you're spending $10 to save $10....
I have the whole *arr stack setup with Plex running in the US just fine, but that's for sure not for everyone and was a few headaches to get up and running
>Of course, then you're spending $10 to save $10....
Most VPN subscriptions are around $5, whereas netflix with ads costs $8, and $18 without ads. Even at $18 though, it's still not 4K, whereas you can easily pirate 4K versions with your VPN subscription.
Appreciate the reality check. Mullvad has been a bill I don't think about twice when it comes around, and I cancelled streaming services years ago.
To your point though, as I'm running my plex server on an old ~midrange laptop, 4K is pretty rough for me to stream as well. I'm sure better hardware fixes this, but that's higher cost. YMMV based on what hardware you have on hand to repurpose
>To your point though, as I'm running my plex server on an old ~midrange laptop, 4K is pretty rough for me to stream as well.
Unless you're doing reencodes processing power shouldn't matter. You can serve 4K video on a 2010s router if you wanted to. If you're doing reencodes, why bother? Download an encode that's appropriate for how you're watching it. 4K for the big screen and 1080p for mobile. Skip reencoding altogether.
I don’t think it’s totally worthless. I think people who make it, producers, are extremely corrupted friends of Jeffrey Epstein with each one sooner or later turning out to be a sex offender.
There is a difference.
If you have any sort of conscience you simply don’t want to fund these people. Don’t enable them. Let it wither. Nothing of particular value will be lost.
>I think people who make it, producers, are extremely corrupted friends of Jeffrey Epstein with each one sooner or later turning out to be a sex offender.
This applies to everything that comes out of Hollywood?
Then why consume the stuff at all? What a weird stance. "They're all vile and evil, but I like watching shows, so whatever, tee hee - piracy is morally good now as long as I have this invented fiction in my head!"
This is a good question. If it is so cheap and easy then why not? I think it is a matter of american government and corporate terror tactic.
They make these few rare cases when they catch somebody so loud and showy that the rest of the flock prefers to sign all the TOS and don’t have this additional worry. It is a success story of manipulative scare techniques that copyright corpos mastered.
Most people prefer to be civilians than to be anti corporate combatants, even if it is perfectly safe in practice. This is normal.
Piracy is dead simple these days. Search for “[media name] free streaming” on Yandex and you get a high quality stream with subtitles and multiple audio choices. This works for most stuff, though not everything is available this way.
Sure, but even the specific case isn't about TOS within the limits of screen time or online browsing. It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers. Sure, you can get off streaming services, but you're still signing a TOS or waiver by using any service. Meta/Google/etc has a profile on you even if you've never logged in based on others sharing their contacts and pictures that may include you.
>It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers.
1. If the complaint is about non-consensual tracking, using a gadget that's specifically designed and advertised for tracking, and that you have to specifically go out and buy and put on your body is a terrible example.
2. Tile trackers have more or less been replaced with airtags and whatever google's equivalent is, which is designed in such a way that prevents companies from knowing its actual location.
The only reason why I bought a smartphone (first time!) in 2013 was because everyone aronud me had one and they were asking for WhatsApp - util then I was fine with my 4-color-crap phone :-D (and I didnt even know what WhatsApp was)
This news came as I was clicking unsubscribe to all the weird mails that somehow keep piling up in my inbox, with LinkedIN being the leader, and then some by bandcamp. More than ever I enjoy turning off the mobile data while on the go.
Very soon I'll do another round terminating most subscriptions, as Goog showed me what happens otherwise - it still owes me these 500$ that somehow miraculously flew out of my ads account when a campaign decided to suddenly come to live and start converting into obsolete project like 2 months after its designated final date. Nobody ever came back to my complaints.
You can try to buy physical media. A surprising amount of shows and movies are still published as Blu-rays.
The release there is usually a bit delayed to streaming releases though and will set you back more if you buy it new. The used market can be your friend here, especially for older media. IME local libraries might also have quite a good offering depending on their funding and priorities.
The clear downside here is that you can't really follow along with others though (if that's your jam) as these releases are mostly in-full and not per-episode.
The only DRM-free video TV media sources are usually non-legitimate (torrents etc.). Many shows/movies are also interestingly ripped from streaming sites first though. You can of course legally format shift your physical media for private use to non-DRMed files depending on your region.
Counterpoint: fighting for consumer protections is a fight worth not avoiding. Interacting with some of these systems is simply unavoidable (think payment systems, health care portals, email, etc.) & larger corporations already enjoy a huge power imbalance in this relationship. We will just get run over further if we hide from it.
I canceled all of our subscriptions about two years ago and set up a Plex server. I don’t love the direction Plex is going in so I’m teeing up to flip to Jellyfin, but still, it has been so much better than dealing with all of these companies and nonsense.
I feel like we can’t even call it “advertising“ anymore. It’s such a misnomer. It’s basically data fracking and psychological warfare to make us all into little addicts. This whole industry built around chasing “the attention economy” is a social blight.
Similar boat...I'd also like to swap off Plex but a few of my less techie friends use it and I'm worried about the compatibility/ease of setup of Jellyfin on their devices.
Thought about running both in parallel but that seems like a waste. Think I just need a migration day eventually
I've never run Plex, or Jellyfin for that matter. There's a video share on my NAS.
I point Infuse on Apple TV 4K's at it. It works, and cleanly.
Downsides: you have to pay for Infuse Pro to play some formats and deal with some audio codecs. It's IIRC $17 for a year, though, so pretty reasonable for continued development. Your non-technical friends and family can't do the initial setup themselves (it's shared over Tailscale, they can all use the same limited account on your plan), but anyone I'm going to let do this can ship me their Apple TV 4K and let me set it up for them.
It's just weird that it's this complicated. We should get a static IP from our DNS. We should use standard open source streaming conversion mechanisms. It should go over basic video codecs.
Lately I've been working towards just using a webserver to host video files. Sure, it's not adaptive, but for goodness sakes it's simple.
Well, my ISP doesn't support IPv6 for home use, at all. My IPv4 is essentially static - I can't recall the last time it changed - but while Tailscale is a single point of failure for my home network security, it's also one that I can expect to be updated faster than practically any other package.
VLC will play anything I throw at it, but it's not going to go and fetch all the metadata for me and present it in a nice way to the non-technically-oriented users around.
yeah I'm on the same boat. I just have an old laptop hooked up to the tv, which can access a shared folder on my main computer that has all the media. I control it with a wireless mouse, and get an actual fast UI with a web browser instead of the usability nightmare that is a smart tv UI. this is all Windows though, I guess it's possible to have Linux access a Windows shared folder, I've been meaning to look into it for a while
> I guess it's possible to have Linux access a Windows shared folder
It is, and while it's not hard, this was really my first experience running Linux in a long while, and boy do I now understand why people did not like systemd when it came out. It's not bad, per se, but it's not just "stick a line in /etc/fstab". However, even Copilot can put together a couple of scripts for you.
Jellyfin isn't a simple viewer over a filesystem, you have to make a library and give it folders to ingest. It enforces an artist-album-track structure of media, so if you don't like that structure you'll be fighting Jellyfin more than using it.
Yes but you can actually have Copyparty run as a server similar to Jellyfin and have the same thing too?
Am I missing something that I am not looking at? But won't jellyfin have the same issue, I think that plex has servers that you can connect from outside but the GP wanted to move to jellyfin and I was talking about that.
And, you can even have plex like thing by just having Cloudflare Tunnels/Tailscale + Copyparty too.
I like the phrasing of this because it tells us nothing of whether your family liked the change (or felt better off with it) or not. You can adapt to a lot.
This ruling taken in conjunction with “in the future you will own nothing, and you will be happy” paints quite the dystopian picture where not even “turning off and disconnecting” will save you.
Indeed. “Privilege of the rich” could be the subtitle for the biography of America. Perhaps founded on the basis of rights for all men, but always denying or chipping away at those rights for the classes of labor.
I’m always cheering for the farmers who are taking on John Deere for the right to repair.
In 30 years the only sort of novel idea anyone has come up with for making money out of tech that has got any real traction is harvesting people's data. Web search - data harvesting. Social media - data harvesting. LLM as a service - data harvesting. Is that because the same money people keep betting on the same sorts of ideas from the same sort of graduates from the same cultural background?
There was crypto coins but pyramid schemes have been around forever.
Why would anyone with a shred of awareness want to subscribe to any LLM service. Particularly a foreign one where that data could potentially end up in the hands of business competitors, political enemies, extortionists or others. That goes for all of the cloud really. Like WTF people. Why do you do this?
I do wonder if all this extra user data will be of much use. I suppose it could make commerce frictionless, recommending the exact product/service to you at the ideal moment, before you've even heard of it.
But the nature of innovative products and services is that most people don't know how to use them yet, and therefore they can't be recommended based on user data. So idk...
The only thing that will save OpenAI is a miracle. The deals only prolong the pain. Just end it already. Nobody wants their products. We want affordable RAM and SSD.
Over investment in AI data centers is having a huge negative impact all over the economy. Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy.
Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.
Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or not meet expectations which really is the tip of the iceberg.
The US/SK memory cartel understandably sold out for a massive short term windfall but they their long term decisions to limit supply have created a huge opportunity for China. I wouldn't be surprised if this will go down in the history books as the start of the exit for US/SK from the industry and the start of Chinese dominance.
The smart phone industry is likely to respond with an increasingly hostile anti-consumer approach as they try and lock customers into the cabins of the sinking ship. I expect cheap and cheerful Chinese budget phones aren't going anywhere.
I am happy for ram, cpu and storage to stall. I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest. I expect to uninstall most of my apps rather than install new ones as I increasingly disconnect from an ever more distracting and worthless medium. I have cancelled nearly every subscription service in the last 12 months. And I have been deleting a lot of free accounts and apps. Its like doing a big cleanup. Surprisingly rewarding.
HN has felt like more than 50% AI industry promoting blog spam of little interest to me as a reader for some time. I am setting a budget of ten, no make it five, more posts here. Then I am out for good. Account deletion and no looking back.
> Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.
Companies have reduced staff because of the impact of tariffs, because of low consumer confidence and spending, or as a ploy to pump share prices. Then they claim it’s AI, because it sounds a lot better to say that you’re reducing headcount because of AI than it does to admit that you’re cutting costs because of falling revenue.
The deeper problem is that businesses are now expected to be funded by investors. There was a time when banks funded new businesses with loans, but now most of their lending is mortgages. Banks were better because they would lend to any business they thought wouldn't go bankrupt and weren't subject to FOMO and thinking only about future profits/exit, which they weren't entitled to.
Question is, is it really impossible for businesses to fund themselves with bank loans now? John Kay wrote about this years ago arguing the finance sector is no longer a good thing for society but has become more of a leech: taxing the money supply but not supporting new businesses. I feel like it's only become worse now. Even insurance is barely really insurance any more. It's more like a savings account that you might be able to withdraw from when you need it, but not necessarily.
I agree with you on the AI blogspam. This is a lot like the dot-com era, where a profusion of capital is causing people to develop complete horseshit products nobody needs. When the shine comes off, a lot of companies will fade, but many will stick around, and become the FAANGs of the 2030s.
In some ways it's pretty interesting to watch the entire world mobilize production for AI; some folks like to call this "hyperstition" as the future AGI reaches backwards in time to compel its own creation. Wild, but when trillions of dollars - i.e. millions of people's entire life output of work - are being put into something, it's truly an effort on a scale that no societal project has ever been before. There's no leader, nobody is in control, nobody has the grand vision other than "build the thing and get rich in the process". Amazing times to live in. The best use of our time and resources and coordination? Probably not... as we look around our broken cities, stepping over our poor and hopeless...
Are we sure these are ram shortages or ram "shortages"? If these are "shortages" why blame the ai companies for exposing it, you should complain to the ram maker for refusing to manufacture any.
The AI boom is worse for DRAM fab planning than the crypto boom was for GPUs.
It's way way way bigger, somehow has huge money behind it, and DRAM fabs are investments with usually no less than 5 years latency from starting to build any particular one until the first memory sticks show up on a best buy shelf, while planning for the factory to produce continuously for 20+ years in normal times to turn profit if one calculates in lending rates/interest.
They are not curtailing themselves in a market as lucrative as the current one; they probably boost their marginal work planning impacts to productivity via predictive maintenance like actions to err on the side of more productivity due to the immense profit each Gigabit they can deliver this year makes them.
Literally like over half of what a consumer pays today at best buy could be expected to be just profit of the factory based off of the non-artificial supply limits and the huge AI demand pushing out all but the wealthiest home-PC demand...
There have been multiple RAM price fixing scandals in the past so my default position is strong skepticism in this matter. I am sure they have various "explanations" but I will wait before believing them.
The U.S. gov't is now committing a sizeable chunk of GDP to investments and subsidies to AI companies and data centers and has reduced overall investment in wind and solar.
Brutally cold capitalist take. Go walk around your city, friend; remember the tragedy of the commons. There is a lot that needs to be done that isn't being done, because we're soaking up people's life's work on this effort that we don't even know the end goal of. It could result in some awful outcomes for everyone if not guided correctly, and it seems like it's not being guided at all - or worse, it's being guided by the Department of War.
The algorithm has been given a job todo. First priority on any platform is engagement and a well functioning, complete human being is not going to be engaged by rage bait and hate. They are rare, precious jewels. The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. It is relentless and escalates until their brains cook. Algorithmic social media is a massive social harm. The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get.
These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.
Off topic, but I bet a book on tobacco cultivation/history would be fascinating. Tobacco cultivation relied on the slave labor of millions and the global tobacco market influenced Jefferson and other American revolutionaries (who were seeing their wealth threatened). I've also read that Spain treated sharing seeds as punishable by death? The rare contrast that makes Monsanto look enlightened!
Mm, definitely. I think it's probably the cash crop that has historically been the most intertwined with politics, even more so than sugar.
Central America, the Balkans, the Levant. The Iroquois and Algonquians. Cuba. The Medicis and the Stuarts. And, as you say, revolutionary Virginia and Maryland. Lots of potential there for a grand narrative covering 600 years or more!
(And, to gp: yes, it absolutely did threaten governments, empires, and entire political systems!)
Yeah, isn't it only a relatively recent split - mid 20th century, I think?
Before that, the term "economy" was only used as a synonym for thrift or a system of management or control (and "economist" tended to mean someone who wanted to reduce spending or increase restrictions on something).
Arguably Marx is the most important historical scientist when it comes to political economy. The methodology pioneered by him has been extremely influential.
Reactionary liberalism, e.g. neoliberalism, Austrian school, that kind of thing, discards the 'mess' of interdisciplinary approaches and seek a return of a protestant worldview, riffing off of their use of the New Testament verses about "render unto Caesar". This puts them in harsh ideological conflict with the political economists and elevates their 'theology' above the work of previous scientists.
Historically some trace political economy to ibn Khaldun, but in the Occident it's Ricardo, Mill, Marx and so on that create a (to us) recognisable science out of it.
Science is not the only legitimate form of gaining knowledge. What you write applies to every philosopher. And economics is not generally known for being the most scientific of all sciences. This is all the more true of neoclassical economists, who are probably closer to your worldview if Marx triggers such a knee-jerk reaction in you. Whether you like it or not, Marx was a gifted systematic and analytical thinker. Even his ideological opponents admit this. At least if they can hold a candle to him intellectually...
Marx wasn't a scientist. He didn't follow the scientific method. He was a lazy pseudo-intellectual who cherry-picked particular pieces of history to support his preferred narrative.
Actually I've read it and am quite familiar. It's true that he was influential but all of his work was shoddy and poorly reasoned. Only morons are impressed by it.
The problem with this is that section 230 was specifically created to promote editorializing. Before section 230, online platforms were loath to engage in any moderation because they feared that a hint of moderation would jump them over into the realm of "publisher" where they could be held liable for the veracity of the content they published and, given the choice between no moderation at all or full editorial responsibility, many of the early internet platforms would have chosen no moderation (as full editorial responsibility would have been cost prohibitive).
In other words, that filter that keeps Nazis, child predators, doxing, etc. off your favorite platform only exists because of section 230.
Now, one could argue that the biggest platforms (Meta, Youtube, etc.) can, at this point, afford the cost of full editorial responsibility, but repealing section 230 under this logic only serves to put up a barrier to entry to any smaller competitor that might dislodge these platforms from their high, and lucrative, perch. I used to believe that the better fix would be to amend section 230 to shield filtering/removal, but not selective promotion, but TikTok has shown (rather cleverly) that selective filtering/removal can be just as effective as selective promotion of content.
When you have a feed with a million posts in it, they are. There is no practical difference between removing something and putting it on page 5000 where no one will ever see it, or from the other side, moderating away everything you wouldn't recommend.
Likewise, if you have a feed at all, it has to be in some order. Should it show everyone's posts or only people you follow? Should it show posts by popularity or something else? Is "popularity" global, regional, only among people you follow, or using some statistics based on things you yourself have previously liked?
There is no intrinsic default. Everything is a choice.
I remember back in the day when Google+ was just launched. And it had promoted content. Content not from my 'circles' but random other content. I walked out and never looked back.
Of course, Facebook started doing the same.
The thing is, anything from people not explicitly subscribed to should be considered advertorial and the platform should be responsible for all of that content.
"We have a million pieces of content to show you, but are not allowed to editorialize" sounds like a constraint that might just spark some interesting UI innovations.
Not being allowed to use the "feed" pattern to shovel content into users' willing gullets based on maximum predicted engagement is the kind of friction that might result in healthier patterns of engagement.
While I agree "There is no intrinsic default. Everything is a choice." and "There is no practical difference between removing something and putting it on page 5000" and similar (see my own recent comments on censorship vs. propaganda):
> Should it show everyone's posts or only people you follow?
Only people (well, accounts) you follow, obviously.
That's what I always thought "following" is *for*, until it became clear that the people running the algorithms had different ideas because they collectively decided both that I must surely want to see other content I didn't ask for and also not see the content I did ask for.
> Should it show posts by popularity or something else? Is "popularity" global, regional, only among people you follow, or using some statistics based on things you yourself have previously liked?
If they want to supply a feed of "Trending in your area", IMO that would be fine, if you ask for it. Choice (user choice) is key.
Early days facebook was simple:
1) You saw posts from all people you were connected to on the platform.
2) In the reverse order they were posted.
I can tell you it was a real p**r when they decided to do an algorithmic recommendation engine - as the experience became way worse. Before I could follow what my buddies were doing, as soon as they made this change the feed became garbage.
The point is that they don't have to be. You can moderate (scan for inappropriate content, copyrighted content, etc) without needing to have an algorithmic recommendation feed.
This is the first time I've ever heard somebody claim that section 230 exists to deter child predators.
That argument is of course nonsense. If the platform is aware of apparent violations including enticement, grooming etc. they are obligated to report this under federal statute, specifically 18 USC 2258A. Now if you think that statute doesn't go far enough then the right thing to do is amend it, or more broadly, establish stronger obligations on platforms to report evidence of criminal behavior to the authorities. Either way Section 230 is not needed for this purpose and deterring crime is not a justification for how it currently exists.
The final proof of how nonsensical this argument is, is that even if the intent you claim was true, it failed. Facebook and Instagram are the largest platforms for groomers online. Nazi and white supremacy content are everywhere on these websites as well. So clearly Section 230 didn't work for this purpose. Zuck was happy to open the Nazi floodgates on his platforms the moment a conservative President got elected. That was all it took.
The actual problem is that Meta is a lawless criminal entity. The mergers which created the modern Meta should have been blocked in the first place. When they weren't, Zuck figured he could go ahead and open the floodgates and become the largest enabler of CSAM, smut and fraud on earth. He was right. The United States government has become weak. It doesn't protect its people. It allows criminal perverts like the board of Meta and the rest of the Epstein class to prey on its people.
Reporting blatant criminal violations is not the same thing as moderating otherwise-protected speech that could be construed as misleading, offensive, or objectionable in some other way.
Indeed. However, there is no universal definition for what offends people, and never will be. People are individuals who form their own opinions and those opinions are diverse.
Ergo if you start to moderate speech which is offensive from one point of view, it will inevitably be inoffensive to others, and you've now established that you're a publisher, not a platform, because you're making opinionated decisions about which content to publish and to whom. At that point the remedy lies in reclassifying said platform as a publisher, and revisiting how we regulate publishers.
They can be publishers. They can censor material they object to. That's fine. But they don't need special exemptions from the rules other publishers follow.
I think it's good to have publishers in the world who are opinionated. There are opinions I don't like and don't want to see very often. Where we get into trouble is when these publishers get classified as platforms by the law, claim to be politically neutral entities, and enjoy the various legal privileges assigned to platforms by Section 230 of the CDA. The purpose of that section was to encourage a nascent tech industry by assigning special privileges to the companies in it. That purpose is now obsolete, those companies are now behaving like publishers, and reform of our laws is necessary.
Section 230 being repealed doesn't mean that any moderation will be treated as publication. The ambient assumptions have changed a lot in the past 30 years. Now nobody would think that removing spam makes you liable as a publisher.
Algorithmic feeds are, prima facie, not moderation, not user-created content and do not fall under the purview of section 230.
> As interpreted by some courts, this language preserves immunity for some editorial changes to third-party content but does not allow a service provider to "materially contribute" to the unlawful information underlying a legal claim. Under the material contribution test, a provider loses immunity if it is responsible for what makes the displayed content illegal.[1]
I'm not a lawyer, but idk that seems pretty clear cut. If you, the provider, run some program which does illegal shit then 230 don't cover your ass.
You can draw a fairly clear line from the corporate response to cigarettes being regulated through to the strategy for climate change and social media/crypto etc.
The Republicans are basically a coalition of corporate interests that want to get you addicted to stuff that will make you poor and unhealthy, and underling any collective attempt to help.
The previous vice-president claimed cigarettes don't give you cancer and the current president thinks wind turbine and the health problems caused by asbestos are both hoaxes. This is not a coincidence.
The two big times the Supreme Court flexed their powers were to shut down cigarette regulation by the FDA and Obama's Clean Power plan. Again, not a coincidence.
That's because we / our (USA) country is owned. As Carlin said, "It's a big club. And you ain't in it."[0]
But what isn't properly addressed when people link to this is that the real issue he's discussing is our failing educational system. It's not a coincidence that the Right attacks public schools and the orange man appointed a wrestling lady to dismantle the dept of education.[1]
Aside: I was in the audience for this show (his last TV special). Didn't know it'd be shot for TV. Kind of sucked, actually, cause they had lights on the audience for the cameras and one was right in my eyes. Anyway, a toast to George Carlin who was ahead of his time and would hate how right he's been.
If there is an algorithm, the social media platform is exactly as responsible for the content as any publisher
If it is only a straight chronological feed of posts by actually followed accts, the social media platform gets Section 230 protections.
The social media platforms have gamed the law, gotten legitimate protections for/from what their users post, but then they manipulate it to their advantage more than any publisher.
>>the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved
>>treat the company as a traditional publisher
>>because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content
>>vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230
"Democracy" itself was not at stake in the American Civil War because both sides practiced it. The Confederacy was/would have been a democracy analogous to ancient Athens--one where slaves (and women) were excluded from political participation. The vast majority of Confederate politicians, including Jefferson Davis, came from the "Democratic Party"--which, true to its name, championed enfranchisement for the "common (white) man" as opposed to control by elites.
Perhaps a better example is the "Tobacco War" of 1780 in the American Revolution, where Cornwallis and Benedict Arnold destroyed massive quantities of cured tobacco to try to cripple the war financing of the colonies.
Control of tobacco in Latin/South America since the 1700s (Spain's second-largest source of imperial revenue after precious metals) also had a directly stifling effect on democratic self-governance.
I think the point is a significant number of human beings were not participating in democracy at the time because their forced labor was critical to propping up the tobacco (and other) industries.
It’s hard to claim it’s actually democracy when it only exists after stripping the rights from a large section of people who would disagree with you, if they had the power to do so.
Social media cannot "threaten democracy". Democracy means that we transfer power to those who get the most votes.
There's nothing more anti-democratic than deciding that some votes don't count because the people casting them heard words you didn't like.
The kind of person to whom the concept of feed ranking threatening democracy is even a logical thought believes the role of the public is to rubber stamp policies a small group decides are best. If the public hears unapproved words, it might have unapproved thoughts, vote for unapproved parties, and set unapproved policy. Can't have that.
That trivial definition sees limited use in the real world. Few countries that are popularly considered democratic have direct democracy. Most weigh votes geographically or use some sort of representative model.
Most established definitions of democracy goes something like, heavily simplified:
1. Free media
2. Independent judicial system
3. Peaceful system for the transfer of power
The most popular model for implementing (3) is free and open elections, which has yielded pretty good results in the past century where it has been practiced.
Considering social media pretty much is media for most, it is a heavily concentrated power, and if there can any suspicions of being in cahoots with established political power and thus non-free, surely that is a threat to democracy almost by definition.
Let's be real here: It has been conclusively shown again and again that social media does influence elections. That much should be obvious without too much in the way of academic rigor.
Of course social media influences elections. Direct or indirect, the principle of democracy is the same: the electorate hears a diversity of perspectives and votes according to the ones found most convincing.
How can you say you believe in democracy when you want to control what people hear so they don't vote the wrong way? In a democracy there is no such thing as voting the wrong way.
Who are you to decide which perspectives get heard? You can object to algorithmic feed ranking only because it might make people vote wrong --- but as we established, the concept of "voting wrong" in a legitimate democracy doesn't even type check. In a legitimate democracy, it's the voting that decides what's right and wrong!
You write as though the selection of information by algorithmic feeds is a politically neutral act, which comes about by free actions of the people. But this is demonstrably not the case. Selecting hard for misinformation which enrages (because it increases engagement) means that social media are pushing populations further and further to the right. And this serves the interest of the literal handful of billionaires who control those sites. This is the unhealthy concentration of power the OP writes about, and it is a threat to democracy as we've known it.
By that logic, the New York Times also threatens democracy. Of course, it doesn't, and that's because no amount of opinion, injected in whatever manner and however biased, can override the role of free individuals in evaluating everything they've heard and voting their conscience.
You don't get to decide a priori certain electoral outcomes are bad and work backwards to banning information flows to preclude those outcomes.
No. The difference is that the New York Times has not been specifically engineered to be an addictive black hole for attention. Algorithmic social media is something new. Concentration of press power has always been a concern in democracy and many countries have sorted to regulate disability of individuals to wield that power. We get to choose as a society the rules on which we engaged with one another. Algorithmic social media is an abuse of basic human cognitive processing and we could if we wanted agreed that it’s not allowed in the public. It’s not a question of censoring particular information or viewpoints. – Here is that the mechanism of distribution itself is unhealthy.
Why change section 230? You can just make personalized algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement illegal instead, couldn't you? What advantage does it have to mess with 230, wouldn't the result be the same in practice?
230 is an obvious place to say “if you decide something is relevant to the user (based on criteria they have not explicitly expressed to you), then you are a publisher of that material and are therefore not a protected carriage service.
The solution must be a social one: we must culturally shun algorithmic social media, scold its proponents, and help the addicted.
We aren't going to be able to turn off the AI content spigot or write laws that control media format and content and withstand (in the US) 1st amendment review. But we can change the cultural perception.
We aren't going to stop algorithmic social media through sheer force of public will without government involvement.
Social communities aren't nimble. There a ton of inertia in a social media platform. People have their whole network, all their friends, on the platform; and all friends have their friends on the platform; etc. So in order to switch from one platform to another, you need everyone to switch at the same time, which is extremely hard.
Facebook started out pretty nice. You saw what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted, in chronological order. It had privacy issues, but it worked more or less how we'd want to, with no algorithmic timeline. But they moved towards being more and more algorithmic over time. Luckily, Facebook was bad enough that it has gotten way less popular, but that has taken a long time.
Twitter is the same. It started out being the social media platform we want: you saw what your followers posted or boosted, chronologically. No algorithmic feed. But look where it is now. Thankfully, Musk's involvement has made plenty of people leave, but there were a lot of years where everyone, regardless of political leaning, were on Twitter with an algorithmic timeline. Even though a lot of people complained about the algorithmic timeline when it was introduced, they stayed on Twitter because that's where everyone they knew were.
YouTube too. For a long time, the only thing you saw on YouTube was what people you've subscribed to posted. It built up a huge community and became the de facto video sharing platform as a nice non-algorithmic site, and then they turned the key and went all in on replacing the subscription feed with the algorithmic feed. Now they've even adopted short-form video where you aren't even supposed to pick which video you wanna watch, you're just supposed to scroll. And replacing YouTube is hard due to its momentum.
So even if everyone agrees that algorithmic feeds are terrible and move to a non-algorithmic platform over the next few decades, what do you propose we do when that new platform inevitably shifts towards being an algorithmic platform? Do we start a new multi-decade long transition to yet another platform?
It's really simple in the US: stop granting exemptions for the harm the content causes. Social media _is_ publishing. Expecting people to 'eat their vegetables' when only fast food is on offer is realistic, and flies in the face of all we know about the environmental drivers of public health.
If your tree is so weak that a single breeze can knock it off, why blame the wind? Disclaimer: I hate social media of all kinds, it's just that you're missing the forest.
The force of social media these past 20 years has been massive. We're talking radical change to the structure of information flow in society. That's not just a small breeze.
> we will look back at the algorithmic content feed as being on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in terms of societal harm
I agree 100%.
However, I think the core issue is not the use of an algorithm to recommend or even to show stuff.
I think the issue is that the algorithm is optimized for the interests of a platform (max engagement => max ad revenue) and not for the interests of a user (happiness, delight, however you want to frame it).
But the people with control of mechanisms of power like social influence do only care about money, so the voices of people who have other values become irrelevant.
If anything the algorithmic dopamine drip is just getting started. We haven't even entered the era of intensely personalized ai-driven individual influence campaigns. The billboard is just a billboard right now, but it won't be long before the billboard knows the most effective way to emotionally influence you and executes it perfectly. The algorithm is mostly still in your phone.
It’s crazy (but true) to think that by slowly manipulating someone’s feed, Zuck and Musk could convert people’s religions, political leanings, personal values, etc with little work. In fact, I would be surprised if there was NOT some part of Facebook and Twitter’s admin or support page where a user’s “preferences” could be modified i.e “over the next 8 months, convert the user to a staunch evangelical Christian” etc
My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed. I assume the algorithm was shovelling more of them at her because she was rubbernecking. I told her to try a "block every time" approach. It took about two weeks until her feed was (mostly) free of them but it still throws one at her now and again.
I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning" is a service that could be automated, via LLM.
What next? The intellectual dark web?
I think we can have a free market of ideas or whatever you’re fetishising without it meaning that I can’t sit on the couch and open an app to see some family photos without it being intermingled with some loser saying that trans people should be hanged on the street.
And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at.
Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?
That sort of rage bait is literally targeted to rile up people sitting on the opposite side of the kind of people watching that other media site that rhymes with socks. It’s all fake bullshit algorithmically optimized to divide.
Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.
At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.
The worst to me is the way people dehumanize other people who don't agree with them.
The other side politically doesn't just have different views, they are barely human knuckle draggers. Basically neanderthals, so who cares if they go extinct.
Trolls do as well. Very often if a comment is "bad", it comes from a relatively new account. Then it gets banned and a new account is created. Technically it's ban evasion, but dang doesn't really want to change anything at this point.
My wife uses the app, hence the "consistently block the assholes" approach. But if you're willing to stick to the website I can actually offer you this. Write a browser plugin that redirects you to "/?filter=all&sk=h_chr" every time you land on "/". That's what I use for myself.
I did this on reddit to try and get a useful /r/all and it ended up being mostly cats. I never look or vote on cat pictures but by just removing political serial posters, thats what I got.
Yeah, there's always someone saying "Just delete your Facebook account" as if that solves the underlying "Facebook is actively encouraging divisiveness" problem.
My mother-in-laws Facebook feed is full of fake news - from the left, politically. My own mom doesn’t have a Facebook, but she still manages to balance out the universe with fake news from the right on her YouTube feed.
The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don’t think we can fix that.
I think the feeds depends on the posts you read, even accidentally.
My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.
Yes, hence my comment about "rubbernecking". If you tend to slow down for car crashes, the algorithm shows you more car crashes. It amplifies our worst instincts.
That effect also applies when you try to block car crashes. That happened to me years ago with the same genre of videos. Like car crashes and people falling and hurting themself a little bit.
> My wife was complaining about far right knuckle draggers turning up in her feed.
This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively downvoted to oblivion. That is effective.
On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an individual, but I personally have to do it for every offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible. Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any comments which have N downvotes.
"I'm not interested" and "Don't show posts from this person" is the dowvote button for the algorithm. If you use those functions liberally your feed gets pretty clean and aligned.
I used to belong to a FB nostalgia group that was being relentlessly farmed by Indonesian accounts. The group members (and even the admins) weren't sophisticated enough to spot what was happening. They were absolutely engaging with the spam. They love AI colorizations too.
I don't trust "facebook users" as a group to provide a signal I consider useful.
HN model works, people do downvote for you, if you are just like everybody else here. You indicate that by visiting HN.
In more universal platform such as Facebook you need to indicate who you are by subscribing to specific groups or downvoting some of the content yourself. Just visiting. Facebook is not enoug. Once you signal who you are you also benefit from other people just like you downvoting content you wouldn't like, for you.
Facebook sucks but Reddit's algorithm is even worse. The only positive thing I will say in favor of Reddit is you can turn their algorithm off as Facebook has consistently denied its users a chronological feed of their friends.
How do other people use reddit? I'm subscribed to a bunch of subreddits and that's the content I see. Reddit is honestly one of the more positive parts of the web for me.
which subreddits do you frequent? My experience of any coding subreddits is lots of posturing, lots of closing, no few actually useful answers or discussion
My reddit feed is predominately my local community subreddit and various hobbies/activities - mountain biking and cycling stuff, outdoors stuff, geology, swimming, some ttrpg stuff - and then interspersed with a few more random things that I try to keep with more of a positive tilt - todayilearned, bestof, EarthPorn - that sort of thing.
I do have a few programming subreddits, rust, sveltekit, and adventofcode, which mostly seem more newsy or avenues to help or learn about developments in that area. /r/rust does have an annoying tendency to get posts of some person new to rust telling people who are presumably already familiar with rust about what an amazing and transformative language it is, but those are pretty easy to identify and skip by.
I think it is a mistake to think about people as being helpless consumers of the algorithm. The OP's mom no doubt makes some intentional choices in her life that make a difference. It just doesn't help that the algorithm will lean into whatever will get the most engagement.
> The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out.
No, it gets dumped on pretty much everybody.
My Insta consists of travel and food pictures, and the people I follow are friends IRL and a very few travel/food influencers. So my feed consists of friends, travel/food content, dirty jokes thanks to my buddy who keeps sending them, and an ever increasing proportion of ads.
But both my "suggested reels" and the search view are exactly what the OP was complaining about: a non-stop parade of thirst traps by "content creators" pitching their OnlyFans accounts.
I mostly use Facebook by clicking on email notifications which are always real posts or comments by my real life friends. Some of them are a bit political but I just ignore those.
I just tried scrolling down the homepage and mine doesn't have any extreme political crap. However, it does have local political crap about the popular local issues (mostly bike lanes). Most of it is just harmless stuff like dashcam videos of bad local drivers, historic photos of my city, local issues like city infrastructure problems, curiosities like rare animals or space photos, and ads - tons and tons of ads.
I think it probably depends what you've engaged with indeed.
I find Facebook and Instagram are both completely polluted by that type of content. Facebook used to be trying to feed me right-wing rage bait and I think actively blocking finally cleared my feed of most of it and now it's all thirst-trap stuff. At least it's figured out I'm gay compared to Instagram.
Assuming you mean crap like “school book bans”, climate change denialism, or some dude coal rolling… You realize that is actually bait targeted at you specifically right? It wouldn’t work as bait if it was shit you agreed with! It’s actually left-wing rage bait!
If you were immersed in the “right wing echo chamber” your flavor of rage bait would be about a school introducing a neutral bathroom policy, or some college student struggling to define what a woman is. Every Christmas you’d see articles about cities banning Christmas lights in town hall and Starbucks no longer using Christmas themed cups. It’s all fucking made up nonsense. No real human acts the way these algorithms portray us.
Honestly even ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are part of the trick. Real people don’t exist on a binary axis. We’re all a weird mess of values and experiences that don’t fit neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams, because you can’t sell outrage without an enemy.
The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as a contrived label.
I actually mean the second kind of stuff - I don't know why it fed it to me except that the family connections I have on social media are all on FB and they tend to lean more conservative/evangelical.
People will engage with and promote that stuff even without a recommendation algorithm. Lots of subreddits are full of ragebait if you look at the most-upvoted posts.
>These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.
In places where media is very biased to one political idea, online platforms like Facebook can be a breath of fresh air, people can share their ideas, voice their thoughts and concerns and express their opinions.
This is invaluable for democracy and it does have effect in the real life as it shapes the elections.
People don't depend just on the media anymore to have an informed opinion and the propaganda is much less effective.
And yet the algorithm has spent the last 3 or more weeks pumping MAGA, county and state Republican party, conservative Christian pages. There's a hand on the dials of "the algorithm"
> The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out.
Like teenagers.
> The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get.
Like a cult. Current social media is like a cult that preys on teenagers. No wonder they want to ban it for young people. American government trying to forcefully spread its cult via the freedom.gov proxy is the vile cherry on top.
This is a quantitative change for Trump. He went from preying on a few kids to preying on all the kids in the world. He must feel ecstatic.
Using a fake identity and hiding behind a language model to avoid responsibility doesn't cut it. We are responsible for our actions including those committed by our tools.
If people want to hide behind a language model or a fantasy animated avatar online for trivial purposes that is their free expression - though arguably using words and images created by others isn't really self expression at all. It is very reasonable for projects to require human authorship (perhaps tool assisted), human accountability and human civility
It's been a long time and our memory only goes so far back. I'm not even that old, but the time between WWII and my birth is waaaaay less then my current age. Jimmy Doolittle was still hosting Christmas specials on TV when I was a kid. Nobody knows who TF that even is now. I doubt half of America has even heard of the Third Reich. Sure, they know that "Nazi" is some kind of insult, but the rest is history forgotten. The last educational film on the matter was Indiana Jones III.
Those of us who remember history will continue to fight, and our numbers aren't small. Maybe one day we can begin to repair the enormous national and global damage that has occurred.
It's pretty much the UN concentration-camp conspiracy theory that rightwing nutters have been pushing for decades, except that now it's their guys doing it so it's all OK.
> As with most of the Nazis’ murderous actions, the deportation of German Jews was improvised and haphazard . The increased numbers of Jews arriving in the ghettos of eastern Europe led to severe overcrowding, unsustainable food shortages and poor sanitation. This, in combination with the slow progress in the German invasion of the Soviet Union, convinced the Nazis that a ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ needed to be organised sooner than had been originally envisaged.
I hate becoming the old person shaking their fist at the sky but the AI bros have just gone too far. I don't know why there isn't a bigger political and social movement against them. I would sign up in an instant to see their companies and practices regulated out of existence.
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