[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Zuck wants all of the control and none of the responsibility. I share the tweeter's concern for having him anywhere near my brain. (despite the fact that we've already crossed that bridge)

How come no one has legs

muttonchop wrote:

How come no one has legs

If it's a serious question: Cuz you can't really 'walk' in VR without paying a LOT more money. Lowest Common Denominator for tracking and decent VR = Mask + hands.
If it isn't a serious question... LOL, right?

muttonchop wrote:

How come no one has legs

It's RIMWORLD!

Quintin_Stone wrote:
muttonchop wrote:

How come no one has legs

It's RIMWORLD!

Something tells me Horizon will be far worse that the most war crimey colony where you feed prisoners nutrient paste meals made out of other prisoners that you killed when you harvested too many of their organs so you could trade them for space cocaine.

I only harvest organs when it's completely necessary! Then I let them go. Usually.

Fortune writer David Mayer makes a good observation:

Your occasional reminder that Facebook/Meta, the supposed architect of the VR metaverse, has never managed to build anything of consequence apart from its social network

I'm sure their metaverse will turn out just as well as their cryptocurrency has.

Prederick wrote:

Fortune writer David Mayer makes a good observation:

Your occasional reminder that Facebook/Meta, the supposed architect of the VR metaverse, has never managed to build anything of consequence apart from its social network

I maintain that they didn’t so much build it as capture it. Kind of amazing how having those few years at the start where you could only join if you have a university email address allowed them to have a strong signal to noise ratio at the start.

DoveBrown wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Fortune writer David Mayer makes a good observation:

Your occasional reminder that Facebook/Meta, the supposed architect of the VR metaverse, has never managed to build anything of consequence apart from its social network

I maintain that they didn’t so much build it as capture it. Kind of amazing how having those few years at the start where you could only join if you have a university email address allowed them to have a strong signal to noise ratio at the start.

HotOrNot: The College Years has come a long way.

Well, yeah. Zuck coded a chick-stalking website, and got rich. Now they just do the Microsoft thing: find innovators and devour & assimilate them.

"Our core competency these days," my editor at Microsoft told me in 2000, "is middle management."

Prederick wrote:

Watched it all yesterday in batches. It's by Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, the same guy who did "In Search of a Flat Earth", which I also enjoyed.

A great examination of the 2008 crash, the rise of crypto and NFTs, and how they're all related.

Spoiler:

It's grifters all the way down

Today I encouraged my Discord and meme-obsessed 17 year old to watch it. He's savvy enough to setup his own crypto wallet linked to his bank account, and naïve enough to trust the wrong people and have his wallet emptied.

Prederick wrote:

I'm about halfway through.

It's amazing.

Top_Shelf wrote:
Prederick wrote:

I'm about halfway through.

It's amazing.

Finished this morning. Absolutely brilliant, incredible, and terrifying. A must-watch for anyone with a financial or technology interest.

I swear to God, how is the utterly dystopian online worlds of Cyberpunk fiction significantly less depressing than our actual Metaverse reality?

Prederick wrote:

I swear to God, how is the utterly dystopian online worlds of Cyberpunk fiction significantly less depressing than our actual Metaverse reality?

I clicked on the link, saw the visual quality in that metaverse, stopped reading and have seen enough.

This will not be a thing. Ever.

Let's look on the bright side. Facebook will incinerate untold billions trying to make this work and it will fail so very hard. They are losing daily eyeballs and the ability to spy on us. Their attempt to get in the currency racket lasted a single session in front of a regulator.

If this accelerates the end for Zuck then please work very hard on the Metaverse.

They don't really need this to work, they just need to be sure no one else manages to make it work where they can't.
Facebook's biggest threat is someone else figuring out the next big thing before them and then excluding them from it. They need to be a part of whatever that thing ends up being so they can continue to gather data on its users to sell. They don't care if you personally visit Facebook so long as they can still gather data on you through other means.

Stengah wrote:

They don't really need this to work, they just need to be sure no one else manages to make it work where they can't.
Facebook's biggest threat is someone else figuring out the next big thing before them and then excluding them from it.

I'm fairly certain someone will find the next big thing before them, but what's the over/under on Facebook just buying the next big thing out?

That was how it worked, but part of the reason their recent business report or whatever was so terrible is because they are hemorrhaging young users to TikTok and they can't buy it out.

Why don't we require your data to belong to you and any company has to pay you for it and you can revoke your permission at any time and the company has to be audited and show receipts for them paying you and purging data they aren't allowed to be leasing?

Because they can pay our politicians more money than we can.

Crypto art auction raises more than $72 million for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's legal fund

An online auction of digital art has raised more than $US52 million ($72 million) worth of cryptocurrency to help fund WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's legal defence, the winning bid coming from a group of supporters who had pooled their money.

I'm sure there's no other cause that could better use that money...

its fake money moving from one imaginary place to another though. Does his lawyer take Dogecoin?

This article is kind of a print version of Line Goes Up.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/n...

As Vulture’s Rebecca Alter put it, most NFTs “are about as valuable as a QR code on a Coke bottle cap that sends you to a dead link to an mp3 download.”

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMUpb7jWQAEIpNX?format=jpg&name=large)

I wouldn’t really say growing so much as metastasizing into the culture. The actual active groups seem to have pretty much either stayed the same size or shrunk slightly since the election (Ghost Ezra is still one of the largest influencers and he’s lost somewhere around 50-100k followers, for instance), it’s just that the movement is basically laundering ideas into the “mainstream,” there are conservatives who now believe Qanon propaganda who’ve never actually interacted with the larger Qanon community nor would identify with them in any meaningful way.

Yeah, that's right. You can find Q-adjacent language and ideas pretty much anywhere on the political sphere these days without looking too hard. It is absolutely mainstream.

YouTube Won't Distinguish Between Misinformation and Reporting, So It Suspended My Channel

On December 9, 2020, YouTube announced it would take down videos that alleged widespread fraudulent voting in the 2020 presidential election. A month later, after President Donald Trump's lies about his loss inflamed a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol, YouTube strengthened those policies to prevent the spread of election-related misinformation.

What casual observers might not understand, however, is just how far the policy goes. Not only does YouTube punish channels that spread misinformation, but in many cases, it also punishes channels that report on the spread of misinformation. The platform makes no distinction between the speaker and the content creator. If a channel produces a straight-news video that merely shows Trump making an unfounded election-related claim—perhaps during a speech, in an interview, or at a rally—YouTube would punish the channel as if the channel had made the claim, even if no one affiliated with the channel endorsed Trump's lies.

I learned this firsthand on Thursday after YouTube suspended my show—Rising—for violating the election misinformation policy, despite the fact that neither my co-hosts nor I had said anything to indicate that we believe the election was rigged.

Not to absolve YouTube of any level of blame, but fundamentally, the way these social media sites are put together, they can't be effectively moderated. You're always six steps behind.