Well, you’re more optimistic than I am, but I hope you’re right.
The whole internet feels like it’s in a state of irrecoverable rot, and the last ten years have really tanked my confidence in governments to do anything about the clearly harmful, consumer hostile behavior inflicted on us — mostly because they seem to benefit a lot from letting Meta et al. do whatever they want. Like, EU fines, to date, have looked more like the organization wanting to wet their beak rather than fixing anything. I don’t know.
I was counting from when Facebook et al. became a clear problem — because, again, while I’m glad the EU is looking at this, it’s the US that has needed to take action. Their refusal to do so has left it to the EU to try to do something, and I’m skeptical that whatever they end up doing will make a difference. Like, if the price of the crime is a fine, then the crime is legal for a company as big as Meta.
Justified? Absolutely. Timely? Hardly.
My point was it’s more than a decade too late, and all the EU will do is levy a minor fine that Meta won’t even blink at. The only country that could impose real consequences is the US, and they have no interest in anything that doesn’t benefit these nightmare cyberpunk megacorps.
This is like an article declaring, "EU Investigates MySpace for causing child addiction and harm" -- the people they're trying to protect don't use that product any more. The time to do this investigation was fifteen years ago, and the US government should have been the ones to do it.
Don't get me wrong -- fuck Facebook. I hope they have to pay billions. But the people that company is harming now are adults and the elderly. I'm sure fifteen years from now, once all those people are dead, there'll be an in-depth investigation and legislation about it.
The FTC will take ten years to accomplish nothing of value -- and even whatever fig-leaf ruling they issue will be sued into oblivion, or voided by the Supreme Court.
Privacy is dead because killing it was in the interest of too many wealthy and powerful companies, government agencies, and individuals for it to have ended up any other way.
The two-tier reply system on SO is really useful and would be harder to implement -- the replies to the questions, but also replies to the posts/replies. I don't know how that would look if starting from Lemmy as a base.
I also like the bounty system to highlight questions the community feels are important to answer, which doesn't have an obvious equivalent in Lemmy.
Tagging is also really good and important -- both general tags that should be public and probably defined by the instance/moderators or by the software itself, and user tags which should be private or semi-private and more open. That's stuff that would have to be built.
There's also a zillion ways to improve the user experience. Multiple acceptable answers. Better filtering and search. Better clarity around edit histories.
Really, I think the best course would be to start from scratch, but it'll take more time to get up and running.
Don't buy shitty Chinese EVs, buy the somehow even shittier American EVs!
Head Tap Meme Can't get called out by game reviewers if there's no functional games media.
There's very little decent media criticism of any kind left thanks to the ongoing media implosion, and games media is especially unprofitable.
Almost no one reads the fucking article.
You are describing the human species. Through its entire history.
"Unknowingly"
The real warning signs should have been when people of colour and LGBTQ folk started getting nervous about how progressive governments were big on empty gestures but very quiet when money was on the line
This summarizes the problem well. I've felt like this about voting Democratic my entire adult life: "They mouth the right platitudes, but we all know they won't act on them if the money people demand otherwise. But they're literally the only option I have... so I'm stuck in this shotgun wedding."
It really seems like there are two types of Republican voters at this point: true believers, and nihilists. The nihilists no longer believe in politics as a means of enacting needed change, and are thus fine with torching the whole thing in the hope of getting a fresh start. My dad, who is a well-educated person, was explicitly one of those: "Donald Trump is the hand grenade I threw at the Government, because nobody is fucking listening." And I can fully sympathize with that -- the way we have arranged the modern world does not work, and needs more than moderate reforms.
Unfortunately, the true believers use this nihilism as their path to power -- as true believers have always done, through all of human history. And I've been saying for months now that I 100% expect Trump back in the White House come November, because the nihilism, if anything, has only metastasized.
I don't know why, but my Shorts feed is nothing but weirdo right wingers, huge muscle dudes, and conspiracy videos -- and I'm a middle aged liberal woman who mostly watches sewing tutorials on YouTube. And there's absolutely nothing I can do to convince YouTube that these people can fuck off. It's a nightmare.
The main difference is the quality of the algorithm serving up the videos. YouTube Shorts is the worst, most piss-poor shit I’ve ever seen. Like, it’s “someone should probably be fired” bad.
I really wish the gampad controls were better. Which I know is a dumb thing to want for a game as complex as this.
I've heard that before, too. I'm in the US, so I've got reason to be pessimistic about the reliability of the courts when it comes to holding wealthy people and corporations accountable.
Yeah, but do they, though? I've heard this before, and they're as indifferent now as they've ever been.
You know, it's almost like the justice system has... I dunno. Problems or something.