“Something something piracy is a service issue.”

-Gandhi, probably

I somehow managed to delete my long-winded reply while I was typing it, so I’m gonna try to condense it down into something semi coherent.

In short, it’s not the anonymity that I’m arguing for (though I think there’s a very important debate to be had about the erosion of privacy through removing anonymity on the net), but the strengths of social platforms on the internet that are being abused by bots and AI slop. I think that a blanket ban is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to regulate the bad actors somehow and moderate the amount of social media that kids use, but to effectively ban kids from being able to interact with people outside of their local communities is a bad precedent.

The big strength of the internet (and why it’s so important in empowering oppressed groups like the queer community) is in the ability to connect people and rapidly spread information regardless of distance. They want to take over TikTok because it’s been credited as a major platform in dispelling the Israeli funded myths about the genocide of the Palestinians. Protests of college students broke out on campuses all over the US over colleges getting funding from Israel and the production and sale of weaponry. That didn’t just appear out of nowhere, that information was spread through social media in real time. You can’t get that from a book at the local library (you should still support your local library though, they do so much for a community beyond being a source of knowledge). But this rapid spread of information is exactly what makes the AI slop and all the other garbage (ads, misinformation, the list goes on and on) such a problem, because the bad stuff makes money for the big corporations who run the social media platforms we use. But that doesn’t mean we should ban a tool because people use it maliciously or excessively to the point of harm. Nobody is calling for a ban on TV for kids under 16 despite it having a negative effect on our attention span and being filled with channels like Fox News.

Plus, I am always wary of these “protect the children” campaigns because they are often a false flag to actually restrict minorities’ rights - often queer people. You see this most prominently with porn bans, but stuff like this that allows a government/group to better censor information and control the narrative come up time and time again. There was an attempt not long ago to get rid of Massachusetts’ multi-grade standardized test program called the MCAS. Standardized testing has its issues, but the groups pushing for the removal had no plans to replace it with any form of statewide teaching standards or anything, they just wanted to be able to teach kids that evolution is fake and gay kids go to Hell.

Also, I work with teenagers. They can’t read. Every year standardized tests get easier. The average ACT score in Florida is now 18. That’s almost the same as answering at random, and these kids pay for the exam in an effort to go to college.

I hate to tell you this, but I think this is a Florida issue. Florida is one of the worst states in a country that has been fighting against intelligence for decades now. Boomers but proudly illiterate is exactly what those in power - especially people like DeSantis - want. But the same internet that allows this to happen can also be used to give these kids a better chance. I go on YouTube and see videos of people making a fully working jet engine out of a can of Coke or a hobbyist launching a 3d printed rocket that breaks the sound barrier. I see kids learning about orbital mechanics and reentry heating through Kerbal Space Program and simple circuitry through Red Stone Minecraft tutorials. I see trans elders supporting trans kids who may otherwise never make it to adulthood - sometimes even to the point of telling them their legal rights and helping them get out of abusive households. I see up to the minute medical research news coming from furries who worked on the COVID vaccines on Bluesky. I see so much art, music, and support for passion projects that introduce people to interests that they never knew they had. And I would never want to take all that from kids.

I would argue that the internet has died partly as a result of removing anonymity from the internet, not because of it. The massive centralization of the internet into corporate walled gardens where they can control the narrative is what made your criticisms possible. The early internet was a wild west where you could find anything and everything, for better and worse.

The big issue I have with this is that it isolates queer kids from any sense of community. Trans kids can’t avoid permanent damage from the wrong puberty if they don’t have access to the knowledge that they could be taking puberty blockers. Without access to that community, I didn’t even learn that trans people existed and I could put a word to that existential distress until I was in college.

There are some exceptions to this. Blahaj blocks downvotes, for example. You can downvote a post on Blahaj, but people (like me) with accounts on Blahaj cannot downvote nor can they see downvotes. I’m sure there are other instances doing similar things, as it sounds like Lemmy has a robust set of instance settings/options.

People born before the 2010s, roughly. Doctors and lawyers were at one point considered two of the highest earning professions and it’s only been recently that college debt has really been considered a real issue rather than an excuse Millennials made up because they would rather complain about being poor than lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

For the Baby Boomers, these professions allowed them to buy lots of assets that have since appreciated in value and become generational wealth, and they think the world still works that way.

It’s kind of a mix of things. “Political influencer” is just a new way of saying “propagandist.” Especially when it comes to the MAGA movement and fascist extremism rising all across the globe. These are the new KGB initiatives to destabilize Putin’s enemies across the globe (and all kinds of similar intelligence agencies, the US does the same thing I’m sure). It’s the “outside influence” that Twitter and Facebook were accused of during the last two election cycles in the US, which could have major consequences for Musk and Twitter, and this looks like Twitter trying to get off the hook for that by saying “we gave them the info they needed, we’re not at fault for them making the choice to be stupid and believe lies.”

But the big thing is that it might shake the faith of the cult when they have to start justifying why they’ve been listening to the exact kinds of people they hate.

AI run on statistical probability. The more options there are in something, the harder it is to get right. A clock face becomes hard because practically the entire clock changes from moment to moment, and logos on shirts are similar in that they’re largely all in the same place but vary dramatically in shape to be as distinct from each other as possible, which is basically the exact opposite of what an AI wants. When your whole thing is basically averaging stuff out on a probability curve that’s weighted towards specific keywords, having massive variation in your data points is bad.

What a load of nonsense.

I watched for 30 years as Democrats tried to be nice and tolerant and compromise with Republicans, and Republicans spat in their face and called them communist traitors every single time. Republicans don’t want people who disagree with them, just people who will let them walk all over them.

Trump won because people tolerated the racist uncle, the homophobic grandparents and neighbors, and the anti-vaxxers. And they took that tolerance and used it to propagandize the shit out of everything and everyone, telling people that all their problems are the fault of minorities.

The first thing I add after an ad blocker on a fresh Firefox install will always be Shinigami Eyes: a crowd-sourced system for marking transphobes and allies across the web.

This is literally how we got here. Dems capitulated over and over during Obama’s presidency to keep programs like SNAP going, and Republicans have run the same strategy ever since. Stonewall everything as long as you can, and blame it on the other side the entire time. And people eat it up every single time.

Key words: so far.

The last time the US enacted global tariffs, it caused the Great Depression.

The last time the US enacted global tariffs, it created the Great Depression, which hit the entire globe and was one of the major contributing factors to the Nazis rise to power. What happens here might only be hurting Americans and killing American minorities at the moment, but the psychotic demagogue in charge here will have real international repercussions soon enough. Honestly though, I think the tariffs have done what international sanctions couldn’t do, which is help convince some of Trump’s cult that he’s the one hurting them. Sanctions would just let him blame the outside world.

You should keep in mind, it will take time for everybody else to truly divest themselves of the orange shit-gibbon and all the corporations based here, and that means time in which the fan spraying shit can turn towards Europe.

Millennials have been saying this since 2008, and they’re only seriously considering it now??

I’d say I’m surprised, but after almost two decades of being told that my concerns over housing prices, student debt, poor wages, unaffordable healthcare, etc aren’t important right now because Dems need moderate Republicans to vote for them, I’m really not.

One thing about this is that it seems to labor under the assumption of a symmetrical (or near symmetrical) fight, and that is exactly the last thing that a resistance group should be doing.

The most effective strategy for a resistance group is to be as expensive a problem to deal with and as difficult to get rid of as possible. Defend the community for sure, but the real fight is against the logistics of an armed force. The more time and money they have to waste, the better. Certain kinds of paint are impossible to get off of glass, like the glass used in bulletproof windshields that would need to be completely replaced, or the kinds of clear plastic used in things like riot shields and visors. At the extreme end, there’s options like paying these fascists thugs a “visit” in the dead of night. All these human traffickers have homes to go back to at night, and if enough face repercussions, it will quickly become difficult to find people willing to stick their neck out and possibly become yet another new fountain.

All this to say, I don’t think anybody who actually knows what they’re doing or intends to do something thinks that they’re going to help form a standing army and fight the US government. Sporadic and random acts of self defense or defense of the community? Sure. Suicide by cop? I would be surprised if people weren’t thinking about that eventuality. But Rambo is not gonna happen and any violence will definitely happen alongside the peaceful protests that we’ve been seeing for months now, and not instead of them (at least, not until things get very very bad).

Meanwhile, War Thunder players be leaking classified documents on vehicles to prove that it isn’t modeled correctly in-game.

I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn’t mean that it’s the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

I simply was saying that the “Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke” narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.

Your timescale is skewed. You’re either young, pushing a narrative, or both, so let me describe how things look historically from a sample size that actually matters. 2 presidents is not a big sample size.

Starting in the 80s, the American economy began to decline and the national debt began to rise under Reagan and politicians like him - trickle down economics had begun. In the late 90s, a president balanced the budget and actually began reducing the national debt (by cutting funding to social security and other less than stellar actions). That would be Clinton. And then along came Bush Jr and the post 9/11 forever war in the Middle East. Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the national debt has risen like an ICBM. I remember when news channels talked with disbelief about Bush possibly doubling the national debt within a year.

So it’s 2008, Bush just finished up his second term, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything in the 2008 depression (except for Bush’s rich friends. They got government bailouts and made bank buying up all the poor people’s houses). So, what now? Now, a black man who runs on a campaign of changing things for the better wins the election in a landslide, and tries to do most of what he promised. The economy sees large amounts of growth and jobs added, and the spiraling of the national debt slows down. However, Republicans vow to never let a black man do anything in the White House and the Democrats capitulate before the fight ever starts, so Obama is hamstrung and despite trying, ends up being forced by Republicans shutting down the government to not fulfill any of his campaign promises in his two terms (except for installing a healthcare system that Republicans fought tooth and nail against because it makes it illegal for health insurance companies to kick cancer patients off their health insurance and then refuse to cover them for having a preexisting condition: cancer).

Now it’s 2016 and a man who ran on a campaign of undoing everything the black man before him did and the promise of kicking out all the politicians that he’s been friends with since his big business days in the 80s has been elected. And what does he do? He spends the first 2 years largely going line by line and undoing every single thing that the black man did while in office, and then spends the next 2 years mostly giving tax breaks and government money to the friends he said he would kick out and “drain the swamp” while the national debt once again rises like a tide in a swamp and the economy stagnates. Then 2019 hits and the economy collapses again under a worldwide pandemic, just a month after he got rid of the office the black man set up to prevent a pandemic.

So now it’s 2020 and the country has just elected the old guy who was the black guy’s right hand man. He campaigned on not rocking the boat and keeping the course. Nothing exciting, but we’ll see what happens. True to form, 4 years of stabilization happen. The debt slows down, the economy sees jobs come back, and things are looking a little more calm.

Then, in 2025 the old guy who was so upset about the black guy comes back and his swampy friends are right behind him. The debt begins to balloon and the economy starts to shudder under the weight of global tariffs and worldwide uncertainty of a possible trade war against friend and foe alike. And that’s just in the first 3 months of the year.

Tl;dr: the economy consistently grows under democrat presidents and the national debt slows down. Under Republicans, the economy shrinks and the debt skyrockets. This stays fairly consistent the farther back you go, but Reagan is an important point in this because he started trickle down economics and showed the Republicans that big government can be good for them, too, so long as they hold the purse strings, and Bush is the other important point because he’s the tipping point for when the debt went from manageable to using a sink to try to put out a burning building.

That’s the thing about multiplayer games - no matter the game, people never change. Some games incentivize different behaviors, but people will be people and will ruin any game if you let them. I think FFXIV does a much better job in this regard by incentivizing players to treat new players more nicely than WoW does, but that’s my personal experience. You can meet assholes in any game.

And I wasn’t claiming that FFXIV doesn’t have ERP. Merely pointing out the hypocrisy of criticizing it when WoW has the exact same issues that you criticized FFXIV for having.

Besides, this is all a heavy discussion for what was just referencing two memes.

And WoW isn’t? The big advantage FFXIV has there is dye channels on their armor instead of recolored sets (though WoW is better in the way you collect transmogs without having to actually store the item somewhere). And you’ve clearly never been to Goldshire or seen the lvl 1 trolls dancing naked on mailboxes in Orgrimmar. WoW is full of people ERPing.

The biggest difference between the two is that WoW doesn’t give a damn about the story and each xpac is obsolete when the new one releases, while FFXIV puts the story first with each xpac being a new chapter and keeps content as evergreen as it can. WoW also caters to their endgame raiders above everyone else, while FFXIV claims to put casual players first (though whether or not this is true is hotly debated in the community at any given time).

They mock you for subscribing to an online service. I mock you for subscribing to WoW instead of FFXIV. We are not the same.

(Insert FFXIV free trial meme here)