#TheSocialDilemma

in the past 37 years, when has america been "great"?

sounds like a contradiction.

Are you trying to get the topic locked. That's all you're going to accomplish.

My apologies. I didnt know asking questions was a no no.

Questions aren't a no no. Politics are.

Look you aren't wrong. But we can't do rational discussion here.

There's no decorum.

The topic isn't *** trump, the topic is social media making everyone into mush brained zombies.

Banning Tiktok was a good move. Perhaps for the wrong reasons but curtailing Chinese information gathering/exploitation isn't a problem. It's late by about two decades. Granted, America does it too and that's just as toxic (if not more) and needs to be handled. It'll take more than shutting down the localization of an application to achieve that though.

Mission accomplished?

Or are we seeing Godwin's Law 2.0? Every internet argument always reverts to Trump.

The difference is as such:

Chinese Government does it to steal information from the rest of the world for it's own profit.
Google/Apple does it to sell information about us to the rest of the world for it's own profit.

One is taken from us, while the other is easily given to them willingly.

Both are trying to use it to take over the world. The methods of acquisition are different, but the end goal is the same.

Social media feeds our dopamine receptors, the same thing that most addictive narcotics do. We are biologically programmed to seek social acceptance and approval because 100,000 years ago getting pushed out of your tribe was a death sentence. One human vs <insert every large mammal predator in the world> is a pretty one-sided fight with a very predictable outcome.

I moved this to Chatterbox; Undead is where topics get moved if they live long enough, but you really shouldn't make new ones there.

I'm not locking this, as long as it stays extremely focused on the topic and doesn't devolve into P+R II: Thinly Veiled Statements I Hope The Mods Don't Notice

Can you remove the feature to make new topics in the Undead section then? Just to prevent that from happening in the future?

Not saying now, just when you have time to breathe again.

Yes but that's not a full view of the situation. There's responsible, ethical ways to utilize these tools. MMOs are an interesting snap-shot into social media, and suffers from different problems; I'm sure all of the long-standing members here can come to some sort of conclusion on how MMOs as a social media have impacted our integration into society and our own perspectives.

Cultural change of this sort is very likely going to cause growing pains as society copes with its impacts - that's inevitable. However utilizing them to protect an economic niche in ways that damage long-standing institutions, hurt individuals and their reasoning skills, and abuses culture for personal gains despite consequences, isn't okay. That's not social media's fault however - it's just a tool, and tools have no implicit morality. A good parallel to social media would be substance abuse, and the mistakes society has made in addressing substance abuse.

Now it's 1 human brain VS a super computer hell bent on selling you garbage and monopolizing your attention.

You're absolutely right, but our biology is back firing against us now.

Only 2 industries calls it's customer's users, software and narcotics.

It's one of those "it doesn't cause any actual harm, and the time spent by automating moves/locking it down is more than the time it would take me to do it manually, even if I had to do it a dozen times".

If we get some plague of weirdos making Undead threads (HALLOWEEN IS 364 DAYS AWAY), then maybe, but for now I have way bigger fish to fry.

Not selling the information is one way, but if you do that, those social media platforms would go out of business quick.

This is a literal "You can't make a cake and eat it too" scenario.

Websites like this gets away with being a "social media" platform because it's not the main goal of the website, just a feature. Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter have no choice but to sell the personal information of their users, because ad money isn't that great and cannot keep the servers working or the employees paid.

I would sell you miscreants to the Yakuza for an extra order of fries at Arby's, but Scragg was like noooo hold out for the combo meal

WITH A JAMOCHA!

Ummm, my attention span is worth no less than full blown 100$ surf and turf, not a scallop less.

Agreed. Let them eat cake.

Open source it, these companies don't "need" this money, literally just printing wealth out of thin air, there is no real world value to their product, because their product has nothing to do with it's users desires, or needs.

The real product, is the slight imperceptible change in behavior of their users. To quote a dude named Jared in the documentary, that is the only product, that is the only possible product.

Someone else said that these data collection "apps" are trading in human futures. They have already been able to have a measurable influence in elections, they are getting better at it. The entities who buy the product, almost always do not have the interest of personal liberty in mind, infact quite the contrary, the organizations buying the products (our behavior) are paying to control the masses in favor of their own agendas, (religious, political, economical, etc, from all's sides of the spectrum)

Trying to avoid specific cases because that is not important to this discussion, the real thing that needs to sink in, is that these platforms are not just a toy that you get to check in with your friends with, these apps are very dangerous to humanity.

Yeah, if the main motivation here was simply greed then it wouldn't be nearly as nefarious. Power and control beyond what money can buy is currently at play.

That's because we seem to thing "we" are the customers, we aren't.

One of the places I've had a chance to work with was a data-mining startup. They collected billions of raw data metrics then put them through a bunch of self learning algorithms that would then be used to answer questions through probabilities. They bought the data from you guessed it, facebook, google and the rest, though not directly. Other companies would then pay these guys to formulate behavior probabilities that are then used for product development / ad placement.

I'm talking questions like "how many hours per week would a 27yo caucasian male spend on game X", or "how likely is a 22yo black female to buy products of different colors". It could output the values in hard numbers or give probabilities depending on how the questions were asked.

You guys know that scene in Captain American Winter Soldier with Zola's Algorithm? Yeah that kind of stuff just at a consumer level. The more data points they had the more accurate the predictions when applied to mass's of people.

So that's what your data is being used to fuel, that is the customer of all the big tech companies, not us lowly "users" but the other big tech entities that do data-mining and probability assessments. In turn those results are sold to consumer companies to determine what color to make their products, how to best present that product to attract the most buyers in various target demographics. It's officially called Business Intelligence.

https://www.cio.com/article/2439504/business-intelligence-definition-and-solutions.html

If you open source these, you just created a worse problem: Government-run social media.

You think Facebook/Google/Apple is bad now? Just wait until <insert political party you hate> gets their hands on managing/dictating what can or cannot be said on social media.

There is nothing more dangerous than government. Be it on social media or elsewhere.

So y'all actively use / find facebook useful?
I cant personally remember the last time anything useful came from facebook, myspace, etc. they typically always die out sooner or later.

My singular use for social media is keeping in touch with family and friends who've since moved to other parts of the world.

And cat memes. Please don't diminish the social value of cat memes on the stability of our nation.

Many of my oldest friends are on FB.

Other than the illusion of staying in touch through it? Not at all useful.