301–310 of 498 posts
1) Privacy / surveillance. There's a lot of things that govt and corporations don't really need to know about you, but now they do. 2) Attention. The double edged sword of easy information is that digital junk food is also easier to get. You can read Feynman lectures or catch up with the Kardashians, up to you. 3) The idiots can find each other. There's no village idiot anymore, they've gone global.
Socializing. This pandemic would have ended months ago if people weren’t on social media. The algorithms cater to fear and the fact people stay online gives them the impression of socializing. Generally, I think it’s broken the sense of localized community; while making it more global. This has upsides and downsides, but I’d like to see a more localized system in place. Regarding the comment about living off the grid…
It's important to remember that [excess deaths](0) aren't merely rumored to be true; they are a hard fact preventing the pandemic from ending. I agree, however, that online socializing is critically deficient, and an inadequate replacement for the communal traditions we've spent [millennia developing](1) to gratify our [social needs](2). 0. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm 1. https://www.g…
My generally point was back when we had the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 we had similar numbers of excess deaths. Yet no one did anything like break down the social fabric of society. I think that only happened this time because we had social media as a stand in.
Logging in. First I need to make an account for nearly everything. Then I need to link that account to a phone number or email. Then every time I use the service I need to wait for them to text or email me a password. If they email me the password then I have to log in to my email, which means getting another password texted to me. Alternatively if it's work related I have a physical key card, a physical password gen…
Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…
Video games. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. There's simply too much money nowadays in micro-transactions, in-app purchases, loot boxes, pay-to-win and in-game advertising that almost everything is "free" to play and it's literally horrible. what we have now is mostly copy-pasted franchise titles (with a year after their name) that are just another optimized hellhole of extracting money from you a small…
Advertising. I know this is an extreme view, but I think any advertising other than a spec sheet style ad (just facts) should be banned. I feel like it steals your attention and mindshare day after day. The ads I see on TV now (rarely, as I don't watch live TV much) are just so horrible. Dripping with emotions and trying to tug on your heartstrings to sell some toilet bowl cleaner or some other garbage. Social media.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you happen to live in or visit the SF Bay Area, and drive on the 280 freeway between San Jose and San Francisco, you'll notice it feels a bit...odd. That's because billboards are banned along that stretch [1], and all you see is the beautiful green rolling hills. [1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11805469/why-arent-any-billboards-...
It seems strange to me someone would be allowed to put up billboards to begin with along public property. I assume the freeway is public property correct? It should be illegal to begin with without approval from the public.
I'm not aware of any bill boards that are on public land (though some probably exist). Rather almost all bill boards are built on private land, or atop private buildings, as a revenue generator for the property owner. Anything within 500 feet of the road is viable, or even further away assuming a large sign. So for billboards to be prohibited there has to be land use regulation that says property owners can't build large signs.
That is actually less trivial to enforce than you might think, because the line between a straight up advertising billboard and, say, the sign that lets you know there's a McDonald's at the next exit, is a little fuzzy. There's enormous pressure from business owners to permit large "marquee" signs so that drivers can spot their business from far back enough that they can easily get in the right lane, slow down, turn, etc. without missing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I basically don’t encounter any ads in my day-to-day life, digital or physical. I have no TV, and use uBlock Origin (including annoyances lists) on laptop and phone. I live in a tiny rural town so that practically the only advertising posters within a 35km radius are first-party advertising on two or three Telstra public phone booths, and in the decent-sized towns 40km away in either direction there’s barely any more…
Advertising is cancer and should die, but billboards and real-world display advertising is probably the least bad version of it. I'd prefer if online advertising (and the associated data collection and privacy violations) were nuked first.
Algo-paranoia. Every time I interact with a remotely "clever" system, I keep thinking how my input will feed some machine. How fast do I scroll, what is in my viewport. What do I listen to and when. Is this an A/B test? Will something I do on a whim affect that machine to predict something incredibly stupid tomorrow? It only became obvious recently, as I was readying an actual, physical book. The relief to realise th…
It should be reassuring to know that most of the things you interact with are actually too bandwidth constrained to care about those things, and the algos you interact with are fairly obvious and explicit (Feeds, curated things, etc)
1) Privacy / surveillance. There's a lot of things that govt and corporations don't really need to know about you, but now they do. 2) Attention. The double edged sword of easy information is that digital junk food is also easier to get. You can read Feynman lectures or catch up with the Kardashians, up to you. 3) The idiots can find each other. There's no village idiot anymore, they've gone global.
Connecting the mentally ill and intellectually disabled and feeding them enraging misinformation in order to sell the maximal amount of advertising is not a business model that history is going to look kindly on.