James R Kirk

Tinder started as a “hook-up” app, if they went back to that kind of marketing I would not find the company quite so reprehensible.

We salute you, Loretta.

M*A*S*H is a very good show, it’s aged (a little too) well and the jokes still land to this day. Highly recommended.

Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian own Digg now. Alexis Ohanian never worked at Digg and Kevin Rose was replaced as CEO by the board in 2010 for non-involvement. It’s still going to be a non-federated for profit platform. But there’s no reason to think they would ruin Pocket or even change it dramatically.

I agree, I really don’t think the concerns about “not being able to tell what’s real” will be a major issue (at least to those who care about knowing what’s real). Social media has been full of human-made slop for years and if someone is getting their sense of reality from social media posts, then that is the problem and AI isn’t going to dramatically change that.

I have a feeling if any of these video generators tried to make a “clip” longer than a couple of seconds they would rapidly become a lot less “real looking”

A Fedi instance requires a time commitment, there are some good suggestions in here but I recommend some alternative frontends.

Potentially unpopular protip: I’ve blocked most of the “prolific” posters. My entire feed was becoming repurposed memes from 2015.

I’m happy there are people out there dedicating time to keeping Lemmy “active” but that is not how I want to live my life.

I love being able to have the small-forum feeling of my home instance but also feeling connected to communities elsewhere.

Turns out good web design skills does not always translate into other skills.

If an instance has a lot of spam, admins tend to notice and block it. In the future it’s likely admins will have more tools too, but for now the system works pretty well.

Back in the day Nike was fashion-non-grata due to their well known child labor practices. The fact that they reinvented the brand to the degree that they actually became aligned with punk/skater culture still blows my mind. Advertising is a powerful tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_sweatshops

People are talking about privacy but the big reason is that it gives you, the owner, control over everything quickly without ads or other uneeded stuff. We are so used to apps being optomized for revenue and not being interoperable with other services that it’s easy to forget the single biggest advantage of computers which is that programs and apps can work together quickly and quietly and in the background. Companies provide products, self-hosting provides tools.

Yes absolutely, and that’s why I don’t think commercial social media will die. But I do think it will come to more be associated with activities gambling or vaping.

There will always be two types of users: people looking to connect and people looking to be entertained. Fedi is better at the former and commercial better at the latter.

100%

The reason behind his weird android haircut is that he thought it looked Caesar-esque.

The American system is far from ideal but I’m convinced 90% of social media posts decrying a “lack of choice” or “monoparty” are cynical actors trying to make pro-democracy voters feel hopeless. I remember in 2019 all of the “The DNC installed Biden” language was all over Reddit.

I’ve never seen someone just blatantly lie about primaries not existing anymore though!

Yeah I have to imagine much of it is bots/artificial views already, this line from the article stood out:

That means this short reel has been viewed more times than every single article 404 Media has ever published, combined and multiplied tens of times.

It doesn’t shock me a single reel has significantly more views than all of 404 media, but “multiplied tens of times”? A recent comment me chuckle:

“Investor fraud is basically the entire business model of well basically everything anymore.”

(implying the ad views are faked to increase the stock price).

I think it’s interesting how “maximizing for engagement” inevitably leads to slop taking over everything. I wonder if real people (with real money) will continue to engage with the slop? Some people surely, but enough to sustain these mega-corps?