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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.

    Some strikingly high percentage can’t complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).

    Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind




  • Yeah, that would help. There’s also the smaller risk of “I was going to click on something else, and this new window popped in under the mouse”

    I think some applications also don’t accept input for the first couple seconds to prevent this. I vaguely remember something that had the dialogue boxes count down from 5 before you could click or keyboard-interact them.

    Feels like the kind of problem with a lot of edge cases, but even catching 70% of the problems would be a big improvement











  • That doesn’t logically follow. No more than saying “Building more highways is bad for the environment, ergo the highway administrators benefit from having more cars on the road.” You’re looking at a problem of induced demand and concluding the problem is on the demand-side of the equation.

    What? Yes it does. Facebook needs users to generate revenue. With no users, they can’t sell ads or user data. How else do you think they make money? Do you not think making money is a benefit for the owners of facebook?

    It’s one node in a massive web. And it’s easy to say “Well, you have to do your part because <insert consumerist morality here>”. But mostly it’s just some random asshole on the internet telling me not to use my telephone because AT&T is run by a richer set of random assholes. There’s no material benefit to me and no collective coordinated action that I’m seriously participating in.

    You’re reminding me of Eleanor from the good place. Do you also litter? Refuse to return shopping carts?




  • Well, there’s the extreme end of things that moderators don’t like posts about People love Luigi, though. But I understand not wanting to throw one’s life away, even if success pushed the entire world onto a better trajectory.

    There’s also that low grade sabotage stuff that gets talked about. I think people were posting the ww2 sabotage manual a couple months ago. Stuff like have excessive meetings, make plausible mistakes to gum things up, that kind of stuff. This works better if you’re closer to a source of the problems (eg: ICE, mega corps, republican think tanks, etc)

    Then there’s safer stuff like protests. There’s the really safe ones where you just go and march. Those have use, but are kind of limited and won’t fix things on their own. You can also do disruptive protests, but you have to be quick and smart, or you have a high risk of going to jail (or worse).

    Radicalizing your friends also can be planting seeds. Maybe those will grow.

    You could run for office, but that’s slow and expensive.

    There’s probably other stuff, too, but I’m running out of steam here.


  • I haven’t seen any real evidence to that effect.

    Do you accept that facebook is harmful to the world, or would I need to try to prove that? There’s the time they tried to see if they could make people sad by adjusting the feed. (They could)

    If you accept that, it’s a small step to “They benefit from having more users on their platform”. More users means more engagement, which means more ads, and advertisers pay more money for those ads. No one’s going to pay big bucks to advertise their stuff to an empty platform. Facebook’s going to have a harder time selling user data and metadata if users aren’t on there.

    Now, getting one family to stop using facebook is a drop in the bucket. But every family that leaves makes it easier for the next family to leave.