FlashMobOfOne

If they end up dropping nukes I hope one falls on my head. I don’t want to survive nuclear war.

These yokels just kinda ignore that unless you’re a federal legislator or a billionaire, you are utterly powerless to do anything meaningful about this beyond virtue signalling.

TBH, not much.

Which pleases me. I actually donate to my instance every month in order to help keep it ad and algo-free.

It’s not a ‘Don’t Look Up’ moment.

People don’t want to hear about it because they’re working 2-3 jobs and 100 hours a week to afford rent on a roach-infested studio and food is becoming cost-prohibitive, on top of education, health care, and yes, fuel too. Both parties have gaslit them about it within the last two years to try and get elected.

And they don’t have any power to do anything about it.

Chances are that if you’re asking that question, your best option is probably to set up your own instance.

But you won’t get much engagement most likely and no one will federate with you. Some opinions seem really popular in a bot-ridden echo chamber, but then you force yourself to interact with actual people and realize that, while you may be free to say things other people abhor, the vast majority (sans bot-driven engagement) find those sorts of things abhorrent.

Hola Kitty.

Normally I wouldn’t pimp out my YT channel on Lemmy, but I made a video on this topic a few weeks ago: https://youtu.be/kklfzIxWJ7I

I hope some of these are new to you.

Not me, but it’s important to remember that Lemmy doesn’t just feed you an algo. You have to actually post things.

The Electoral College

If we want to say we’re a democracy then we need to be a democracy.,

Came here to say something similar.

I’m a little tired of free speech absolutists looking at terrorist ideologies and concluding “No, man. That’s just an opinion.” as if we’re deciding which condiment we like most at a burger stand. Speech is regulated in some ways, and should be. (Look at Stolen Valor laws for an example.)

There is no ‘we’ in your hypothetical, unless you’re sitting on a billionaire fortune or a member of the Epstein class.

The only power you or I have is local, and this is a national problem.

When I was in art school our TA’s were making 20k a year but stilling on 50k - 100k in student debt. They’d all been to bigger, more prestigious art schools, and they were barely getting by. And each of these schools was churning out hundreds or thousands of students every year.

That convinced me to take a different direction in life. Glad I did. I’m still a working artist and make a good living with it as a side hustle, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with the uncertainty.

I support Age Verification

(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)

For a few reasons.

• 1. The government already has all of your info and is spying on you from any device with a camera or microphone and wireless connection and without a warrant or meaningful accountability. We know this objectively because the FBI, desperate to look competent, inadvertently publicized footage obtained illegally in the Guthrie case that shouldn’t have existed.
• 2. It’s not 2014. We have enough information now to know definitively that social media (and increasingly, use of LLM’s) is harmful to children’s mental health, and that its negative effects are more pronounced on developing brains. (Though they affect adults as well.) These systems harm a person’s mental health and cognitive abilities, and while this bit is anecdotal, I know several teachers who struggle to teach kids because they’re no longer able to focus on anything for more than sixty seconds. (And the question: “Why do I have to know this if an AI can do it for me?” is becoming a common refrain.)
• 3. Private entities also already have your data. Go look yourself up on spokeo.com or some other background check site if you don’t think so. (And be sure to put in a request there to have your info deleted while you’re at it.) Or sub to a deletion service that will remove it for you.
• 4. People say that to cut kids off from social media will isolate them, but I grew up in a world where we only had email, chat rooms, snail mail, and land lines, and somehow we magically made friendly connections anyway. It’s a nonsense argument, and ignores that social media itself is isolating people to a much greater extent.

Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don’t expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we’ll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.

He’s probably getting paid for all the endorsements too. After all, he literally sold the Resolute Desk for ad space to Goya.

I just use ‘Hide Post’ liberally.

Thank you for the reply. I hope you have a lovely Sunday.

It’s true.

Just try having a discussion about Age or ID Verification or the Brave Browser and see how quickly you get dogpiled and downvoted to hell if what you think isn’t the accepted orthodoxy.

The only way my views have changed over time is that, more and more, I’m convinced that nothing I do affects much of anything beyond my own neighborhood. I have no illusions about significant national change, but I can keep my own block clean and take good care of people here.

Sounds like a take straight from one’s dumbass social media algorithm. Imagine not having a car and also being anti-public transportation.

You must have endless patience, Madz.

“Please just put our planet out of its misery.”

Absolutely.

I think this moment happens for everyone, because we don’t always realize how our behaviors affect other people negatively, but it’s a sign of growth and maturity when you hit the point where that level of empathy kicks in.