mathlover2

Agreed. We are in for a period of flux, even if the article is crap.

I feel like I could write a blog post about the issues with this Vice article if I were so inclined, but my biggest problem is that it selectively casts social media as trending towards "YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and an endless number of streaming platforms" because apparently YouTube is a brand new site, Twitch is doing well rather than being in decline, and Discord, being an ad-free chatroom service, obviously doesn't even exist.

Also for an article that says somewhat positive things about Mastodon/Fediverse, the author sure hasn't used it, because the only accounts I can find from them are two non-functional Twitter mirror bots.

Having encountered him on the Fediverse before his ban, he's an asshole. Antinatalist of the "man should never have had children" kind, Putin supporter, thinks that old people should not be allowed to vote, thought lockdowns were discriminatory against young people and we should just let old people die of COVID because he doesn't give a crap about them ... Wouldn't surprise me if he said something even worse and it was bad enough to get him banned.

I agree with one point of exception:

Saying post-Musk Twitter is using the private equity playbook assumes that Twitter is being handled according to a playbook rather than being done by an incompetent narcissistic sociopath who hyped his way to being a very overvalued) billionaire, bought a company on impulse, and is now has to make more money off Twitter than is likely even possible in order to pay back said loans.

Basing hypotheses on a single data point, let alone one whose outcome is not yet determined, almost invariably leads to wildly inaccurate conclusions in practice. As such, until we have more data, any questions about the Great Filter and the causes thereof will remain unanswerable.

Personally my bet is on either us being early as intelligent life goes, or extremely massive stellar expansionism on the levels that would allow for us to have encountered intelligent life with basically zero search effort not being something most civilizations would feel compelled to do.

Also assuming that any advanced civilization that exists would have to follow our development path is laughably anthropocentric and reflects a failure of imagination on the part of the people making said claims.

Recently I intentionally got my Twitter account locked (specifically via a tweet insulting Trump Jr. which had gotten my friend's account locked when he posted it originally in response to Trump Jr.) so that I could keep my page (with links to my website and current social media accounts elsewhere) up while denying myself the temptation to ever participate in Twitter again.

My mental health has skyrocketed and I have no regrets. If I need to read anything on Twitter I use Nitter or view Twitter through Brave with a custom ViolentMonkey filter to avoid that stupid "log in" pop-up.

I was using an Android for years. My mother at one point was nagging me to buy an iPhone, and I relented and bought one just to get her to stop nagging.

6 months later I gave the iPhone to my sister and bought a new Android. I still use Android today.

(Apple does not make iTunes for Linux, seemingly out of sheer spite to Linux users like myself. I ended up having to use a slow paid app to transfer files where previously I used a command line and an SSH connection with RSA keys.)

Interesting, though it would be extremely hard to find records of this outside of maybe graffiti, and Roman historians if anything loved to record salacious things like this about prominent people, especially ones the individual historians themselves detested.

My impression is that it was less common to outright deny reality and more common to blame at least the disasters and pandemics on those one found troublesome supposedly offending the gods.

> We are not really fit to do anything else.

If you go by that logic we are only fit to live in tropical savannahs in Africa where modern humans originated.

What I find supremely arrogant, though, is any Westerner who, while living in comfort and safety amidst high technology, proposes that everyone in the world should just be content with not having the comforts they are currently using (including some, like vaccines and modern medicine, which arguably have vastly less negative effects than PFAS and burning fossil fuels).

Anyone actually serious about this philosophy should try as much as possible to make their lifestyles like what they want for everyone. It probably wouldn't convince everyone, but it would certainly earn them a lot more respect.

I think the current economic system needs significant reform, and in many countries massive reform, but a complete scrapping of all markets (which I have heard proposed in some corners of the internet) is unlikely, unneeded, and probably unhelpful

We need social democracy, expanded government roles and investment in certain fields, stronger environmental protections, and other policies that are either known to work or very likely to work.

> One study estimates 100,000 Americans die every year from air pollution

That's still a lot more deaths than commercial nuclear fusion has been associated with in the US. It's also, incidentally, a lot of deaths.

> 1. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without significant government subsidies.

This is a non-sequitur. Just because something needs government subsidies doesn't make it bad. Things like the Internet, modern solar energy, and the USPS were built with either massive initial subsidies or even complete government involvement throughout their ongoing lifetimes. That doesn't make them bad.

> 2. Nuclear power plant falsely reduce costs by externalizing significant costs such as the processing of fuel, the processing of fuel processing waste, maintenance, inspection (eg by the NRC), switching out fuel, processing nuclear fuel, the time-to-build or the failure modes of nuclear plants. Lest we forget, the Chernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone is 1,000 square miles 35 years later.

Versus coal and oil plants, which externalize the costs of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Also, comparing a shoddily built and designed Soviet plant to modern Western ones isn't a good comparison.

> If these next-generation LWRs are so economical, why isn't someone building them at scale? The standard response is political opposition but what about China?

In the West, it's negative perception that largely predates widespread public awareness of climate change. As for China, it looks like China's getting in on the nuclear game too, precisely because of air pollution concerns. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

> delusional as climate deniers

Yeah, no. Even if us supporters of nuclear power are wrong, we don't need to be compared to people who are on the level of flat earthers.

Personally, I find this article ridiculous, even without the irony mentioned in the comments.

I think there should be regulation of ISPs coupled with more community broadband efforts. I also like protocol-based social media. I also think there should be scrutiny of larger companies for anti-competitive behavior. But you can do these things, and other efforts, without banning private investment in the Internet entirely.

Also, this article's assertion that the Internet's golden age ended in 1995 is rather laughable. I know Usenet pre-Eternal September was nice, but I'd hardly call it the "golden age" of the internet, especially since it was barely accessible to the public at that time.

I'm honestly surprised this isn't trending higher, given how it's spiked over the past day.

I can see a scenario in which a "chaotic good" hacker uses a customized form of ransomware on some large corporation or extremely wealthy person in order to force them to make a donation or do some majorly positive action for the world.¹ Pulling this off without going against the "good" qualification would require appropriately selecting the target and files to encrypt, and appropriately phrasing the demands made to that target: you want to choose a target that has a lot of unused money to give, you have to make sure that the files tied up are not things that other, more disadvantaged people would need, and you want to make sure that the requested positive action is both positive and not reversible by the other party after the fact.

Needless to say, deploying the ransomware discussed in the link would not be a chaotic good act. More like neutral or chaotic evil.

¹ And just to be clear, don't actually do this. I'm never going to do this, never have done this, certainly am not doing it at the moment, and I advise that no one else actually do this. There are better ways to use your time.

> Mr. Musk called the bid his “best and final offer,” adding that if his proposal isn’t accepted “I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.” Mr. Musk earlier this year built a position of more than 9% in Twitter.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-offers-to-buy-rest-of...

IIRC he claimed that this was his only offer and that he would sell if it was refused.

My comment is certainly less accurate than I originally thought. I will give you that.

> Canada literally had to suspend the charter and due process by enacting the emergency measures act, which is unprecedented amongst western countries. Why would the government do that if no one supported them anyways?

Probably because they didn't have to deal with a large number of numpties doing that before.

> Your insurrection did not kill 5 people by the way.

There were five deaths. One was from gunshot and the others were from other reasons. The fact that the deaths occurred among the insurrectionists doesn't change the fact that people actually died as a result of what happened, which from what I can tell is more than can be said about the numbskull protests in Ottawa.

> Ironically, from a neutral outsider view, what happened on the 6th of January can also be described as "a bunch of morons thinking they could get their way and being absolutely obnoxious".

Was some high-profile Tory premier instigating the protests in Ottawa with a rally there? Were his own officials involved in the planning? Was there a large number of people breaching the Canadian parliament building while it was in session? Were extreme right MP's feeding information to convoy organizers on where Trudeau was? Because while that's not what happened in Canada, it's what happened in the US a year ago.

I get what you are saying about Americans thinking anything in the US must be exceptional. I've seen that before myself, especially with certain members of my family. But there is a difference between idiot protesters occupying a capital city's downtown and having to be forced to leave and an attempted self-coup by an outgoing head of state.

In the US the division is arguably worse and the masks are coming off.

Wait, why pardon the Jan 6th people? Just because one's been mislead by misinformation to believe something false doesn't mean that they are blameless for flagrantly breaking the law in response.

Was social media the cause of the division, or did it merely allow people to exploit existing problems?

Assuming that social media is a primary factor, for the sake of argument, the solution to this problem isn't regulating the platforms via Haidt's proposals (which I should add seem to be too limited in effect). Instead, we should decentralize the platforms into protocols. While this will still allow stupid people to go into echo chambers (like with any forum or blog online) it will also limit their reach by depriving them of a singular place for a giant number of people to hear them all at once.

France has its own issues as well, in many ways parallel to the US from what I have heard, with a sharp urban-rural divide and a legacy of colonialism that has largely not been addressed.

It isn't immune, but it certainly hasn't gotten to the point it has in the US. We had a failed insurrection two years ago that killed 5 people. The truck convoy was a bunch of morons thinking they could get their way by going to Ottawa and being absolutely obnoxious --- and ultimately failing because no one wanted to put up with their shit.

Social media is a factor. It's not the main factor, and Haidt's weird focus on it rather than deeply entrenched and growing economic disparities, lack of education in the US, the rise of the religious right, and other factors is in my view kinda silly.

This is the dumbest thing I have seen come from Jonathan Haidt. If social media is this powerful a destabilizer of societies, I wonder how Haidt explains first world countries like Germany, Canada, and most of the rest of the planet that have social media but haven't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has.

Dang, you beat me to the first comment! XD With regards to hoping Twitter dies: same.

I hope it is. Other than serving as a glorified RSS feed --- and it really should have never taken on that role --- it is not suitable for the other things people use it for.

Discussion and dialogue? Use Discord or a chat application/website. Interacting with weird quirky people? Discord or Mastodon or a traditional forum. News? Google News, AP News, or anything that isn't social media. Discussions elsewhere with links to Twitter at this point are better than Twitter itself, because you get to avoid dealing with idiots and the endless onward streaming of misinformed takes.

Honestly, I actively want Twitter to go away. There are too many stupid people using it as a discussion forum rather than as a notification service, and too many people taking the inane, nuance-free, dumbed-down mudflinging on Twitter seriously, for me to like the site.

I would recommend Desmos and Python.

Actually, even Twitter has a CP problem. I've seen it discussed before, where various accounts with CP were reported, but action on said accounts was delayed due to unknown issues on the side of Twitter. Meanwhile, the moderation on Mastodon instances varies from being more lax than Twitter to being more strict (IIRC that instance you linked is slightly more strict than Twitter).

Also, Mastodon wasn't built "explicitly against witch hunts". A lot of people go there because they don't like the hellscape that is Twitter, or because they simply want a different audience. Heck, there are many people --- myself included --- with both Twitter and Mastodon handles. The people who go to Mastodon after a Twitter ban usually end up on more toxic fringe instances, like radical.town (tankie) or social.quodverum.com (MAGA).

Depending on which part of Mastodon you are on, you can still find witch hunts, usually on the fringier instances.

There are many ways to avoid encountering illegal pornographic content on Mastodon. Indeed the one you linked to does just that, by having a mod staff that can block offending accounts and suspend interactions with instances.

I think VR will definitely take off as a gaming medium. I don't think it's going to take off as a Metaverse for social media. From what I can gather, most people don't want to work and live with an Oculus Rift headset on most of the day.

Heck, a lot of people couldn't stand being restricted to Zoom and other internet interaction during lockdown (admittedly I didn't mind as most of my social life was online anyway prior to the lockdown.) Imagine trying to make all of that happen via VR headsets instead of tablets and screens.