Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Old Twitter was terrible for peopleās souls. I can only imagine what it is like now that the well-meaning professionals are gone and catturd and Wall Street Apes are the leading accounts.
Iām willing to go out on a limb and say that short-form social media in general (Twitter and imitators, Instagram, TikTok) is essentially a failed set of media. But Iāll concede thatās like cramming a Zyn pouch in my mouth while making fun of a guy chain-smoking Marlboros.
Iāve read speculation that in 30-50 years people will have an attitude towards social media that we have towards cigarettes now.
That would be really nice but that scenario feels pretty optimistic to me on a few points. For one, scientists doing research were able to overcome the lobbying influence and paid think tanks of cigarette companies. I am worried science as a public institution isnāt in good enough shape to do that nowadays. Likewise part of the push back against cigarettes included a variety of mandatory labeling and sin taxes on them, and it would take some pretty major shifts for the political will for that kind of action to be viable. Well maybe these things are viable in the EU, the US is pretty screwed.
The only people I trust as little as I trust the owners of corporate social media are the politicians who have decided to cash in on the moment by āregulatingā them. I mean, here in progressive Massachusetts, the state house of representatives just this week passed a bill that, depending on the whims of the Attorney General, would require awful.systems to verify the ages of its users by gathering their government-issued IDs or biometrics. We are, you see, a āpublic website, online service, online application or mobile application that displays content primarily generated by users and allows users to create, share and view user-generated content with other usersā. And so we would have to āimplement an age assurance or verification system to determine whether a current or prospective user on the social media platformā is 16 or older. (Or 14 or 15 with parental consent, but your humble mods lack the resources to parse divorce laws in all localities worldwide, sort out issues of disputed guardianship, etc., etc.) The meaning of what āpracticableā age verification is supposed to be would depend upon regulations that the Attorney General has yet to write.
So, yeah, as an old-school listserv nerd who had the I am not on Facebook T-shirt 15 years ago, I donāt trust any of these people.
Iām not quite so pessimistic. Itās important to remember that the actual practical purpose of the extant corporate social media* is to convey targeted advertising; i.e. an optimization (possibly the last optimization) on American management of global supply chains. Those supply chains were already starting to be optimized past their breaking point: flooded with dissatisfactory junk, easily spoofed by low-quality sellers, on top of broader externalities besides. And now, they have now been blasted into fine dust by a failed presidency partially funded by the social media and online advertising barons. It may yet be something of a self-correcting problem, albeit having done substantial damage in the meantime.
*Twitter is now a fully dedicated advertising campaign for Elon Muskās program of white supremacy, with financial returns no object. Itās not quite going according to plan. By this time next decade, the Twitter microblogging permutation of the tech may be thoroughly killed, and if not itāll be disgustingly cringe. Who do you think you are posting like that, Baby Trump?!?!
The collapse of the current American management of global supply chains isnāt exactly an optimistic expectation, but I guess it beats social media continuing as it is into the future and maybe a better global order will develop in the aftermath.
Havenāt seen any estimates of death toll due to social media but cigarettes is/was pretty staggering (20-40m), way too big to hide - https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-holocaust/hardcover - if itās āonlyā 50 years to flip the consensus on social media, that would be a faster process, I do hope its possible though. Tobacco execs had the good sense to keep a relatively low profile compared to Zuck and Musk, so that might speed it up.
It almost makes me feel sorry for the way the rationalists are still so attached to it. But they literally have two different forums (lesswrong and the EA forum), so staying on twitter is entirely their choice, they have alternatives.
Fun fact! Over the past few years, Eliezer has deliberately cut his lesswrong posting in favor of posting on twitter, apparently (heās made a few comments about this choice) because lesswrong doesnāt uncritically accept his ideas and nitpicks them more than twitter does. (How bad do you have to be to not even listen to critique on a website that basically loves you and take your controversial foundational premises seriously?)