I think most computer users now don’t know that file systems exist

Fear and hatred of out-group is a pretty core part of conservatism. They are bad people

He got people talking, which is worth something.

Feel a little like a crazy idiot, but I wasn’t sure where long beach is and it was kind of hard to figure it out. California.

There are certainly worse candidates. Stewart still seems like he has a soul, unlike most republicans.

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.

Those aren’t the only email providers, and using email is less harmful than using Facebook.

email exists and isn’t run by the worst people on earth

The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.

Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.

This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you’re saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

Sometimes I forget people watch YouTube on purpose. Other than music videos and the rare “how do I do this thing in this game?” I just don’t use it

I feel like an alien sometimes. Reading books like some sort of lost time traveler.