Post #2811253

2026-03-17 20:11 UTC

Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you? Madness. I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read. I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does. But people do: Top five highest reaching smart phone apps: WhatsappFacebookInstagramGmailYoutube All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter. I don’t use any of them. I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests. I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site. I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative. But people should be free to do what they want. I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too. Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it. But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly. Prohibitions always do.

Replies (1)

@pre@boing.world 2026-03-17 20:12

There is support for these laws because people think the only consequence of a ban on a thing is that the thing stops existing. For instance: Heroin is dangerous and addictive? Ban it then. And suddenly you have organized crime and a grey market and criminal gangs shooting each other in the streets while addicts can’t seek help and have to resort to crime to fund their addiction. Their lives more chaotic and criminal than ever. Our streets are littered in needles. Well done everyone. Now we think algorithmic social media may be mind bending? Shall we ban it? For kids? Even if we can’t define it? If you break kids access to the internet you sacrifice all the good that the majority of kids are getting from it for an ineffective solution which won’t fix anything and will mean massive increases in government surveillance and censorship. To data-hordes being hacked and people suffering ID theft. And it won’t help. Misogyny and sexism and depression are older than the internet. Plus of course kids remain better at accessing computers than their parents. You’re going to end up breaking the internet for adults who can’t figure out how to verify while the kids start to use VPNs and stolen IDs to browse 4chan.

Open ##2811254