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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

> that tech has gotten to a point where user hostile moves don't have as much of an impact anymore

It’s because the small dozens of us that care about the freedom that the small internet afforded vs algorithmic content discovery is now the minority and no big platform cares about us.

In the early days of the internet, they had to care. They had to convince people to leave their beloved forums and IRCs and move to Facebook or Reddit.

Internet users were fairly niche and fickle. Now everyone uses the internet and most people don’t care about their own freedoms wrt how they interact with technology.

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> Now everyone uses the internet and most people don’t care about their own freedoms ...

Honestly, you can leave it right there. No need to add " wrt how they interact with technology".

I'd add that most people aren't even aware of their own freedoms or the value of those freedoms. Civics education is probably at its lowest point (globally). A lot of people are only aware of the heavily "interpreted" version of those specific rights that they are constantly beaten over the head about by vested interests via old and new media.

I was thinking about leaving it there, but I think if you asked someone flat out about their freedoms, they’d care.

In practice it’s, apparently, hard to notice when they’re under attack.

Well, they may say they care, but their actions are often not aligned with that.

While you’re not wrong, you have to keep in mind that there are actors who try very deliberately to hide the fact that they are removing freedoms.

Most people aren’t on the lookout for every reduction in freedom and, at least in the US, we have surprisingly few institutional and/or powerful guards against the erosion of freedoms.

Yeah, now everyone and their mom is on the internet. And their mom probably more then they are.

time for us all to go back to gopher

> It’s because the small dozens of us that care about the freedom that the small internet afforded vs algorithmic content discovery is now the minority and no big platform cares about us.

This. I see people whine all the time about being subjugated to The Algorithm on these sites. On many sites there are easy workarounds to avoid The Algorithm altogether. But when this is pointed out they come up with some reason why they hate interacting with things that way.

In other words most people very much do want An Algorithm. They just might not want The Algorithm.

“The Alogrithm” is just another idea being propagated by an algorithm anyway.

Every time someone complains about ThE aLgOrItHm as a YouTube viewer(*) I remind them that the Subscriptions feed exists and continues to work.

(*) YouTube creators, though, have to have a firm knowledge of it because at this point for many of them less than 10% of their views come through subscriptions.

Yep.

Unless I'm using search functionality, if I don't have a mechanism to view only accounts I already predesignated *and* the ability to sort chronologically: I almost never use that site. As much as people whine about algorithmic content, people don't seem to agree with my methodologies either.

You don't even need an account, you can use an RSS reader on channel pages. I think that's how newpipe populates its feed.

Yes, but I'm talking about normies here. The kind that go "What the heck is a tee tee are ess? I just want to watch some cat videos!"

Newer channels need to have their channel page crawled once to get the actual URL for the RSS feed but older channels do not.

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