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Too true. The first lemmy instance I signed up for shut itself down without warning within a week of me signing up because they’d accidentally federated with a CP instance and their country’s government could have ended up putting the instance’s owner in jail for it.

To be fair, a lot of that is due to significant, meaningful pressures that prevent them from actually shopping anywhere else. Corporations that provide things with much more inelastic demand (food, home goods, etc) are harder to escape from than social media sites that nobody actually needs to, for instance, stay alive.

For instance, Amazon’s “most favored nation” policy means that you’re literally not allowed to sell your product anywhere else for cheaper. Amazon becomes the only place where products have the lowest possible price you could afford.

If you need to buy a given product, whether it be groceries from Amazon Fresh, or diapers for your baby, Amazon will give you the lowest price (by effectively just causing all other prices to go up), and if, like many Americans, you live paycheck to paycheck, you can’t exactly afford to switch stores.

That isn’t true across the board of course, but it’s definitely a bit different from social media.

It’s the network effect. It’s always the network effect.

Your current platform enshittified. Where do you go? Well, the majority of people are going to Bluesky, and it’s familiar in terms of UI, so you go there. Sure, you could convince someone like that to try something like Mastodon, but Mastodon is comparably much smaller than Bluesky, so its intrinsic value to people is substantially lower, not to mention the fact that without an algorithm, most of these users have no clue how to curate a feed, since every platform has an algorithm now. A lot of these people will have never used an algorithm-less platform in their entire life.

The same goes for Reddit vs. Lemmy. Reddit has much more users than Lemmy, more niche communities, higher engagement, etc. Why move somewhere that’s identical in function if it’s smaller? Your current platform works well enough.

I think it’s easy to underestimate how much censorship and enshittification people are willing to put up with. People will put up with a lot before they switch platforms. Reddit not letting people publish a person’s manifesto isn’t gonna convince many people to abandon their entire accounts and communities and to switch to Lemmy.

It literally took Twitter being rebranded into oblivion, and turned into an explicit safe haven for fascists and far-right freaks, with an algorithm deboosting non paid-for content multiple times over before people really started flocking out in large numbers.

They do, with a rate of about 1/3rd of all claims.

To anyone unaware, here’s your reminder that United Healthcare made $22,000,000,000 in profit in just 2023 alone.

This man’s actions running United Healthcare resulted in massive corporate profits at the expense of thousands of people’s lives.

What happened to him wasn’t unexpected, it was an inevitability. Murderers with enough kills under their belt inevitably get the death penalty, through the justice system or otherwise.

I understand why people seem to think we should tolerate these views, because “muh free speech,” but to them, I say:

The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.

“It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”

That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?

I find those kinds of chatbots useful, but those aren’t the ones I encounter 90% of the time. Most of the time, it’s a chatbot that summarizes the help articles I just read, giving faulty interpretations of the source material, that then goes on to never direct me to a real person unless I tell it multiple times that the articles it’s paraphrasing aren’t helping. (and sometimes, they have no live support at all, and only an LLM + support articles)

TLDR; “weak people have to conform to social consensus otherwise they get hurt I guess?”

I, on the other hand, am a big, strong, high T alpha male, that isn’t worried about what anyone thinks! I am a free thinker, and I know my opinions are correct because I instantly based this entire opinion on a subjective, anecdotal view of the world that I then extrapolated meaning out of, the best evidence! /s

Oh yeah, it’s definitely useful for that!

Since LLMs are essentially just very complicated probabilistic links between words, it seems to be extremely good at picking the exact word or phrase that even a thesaurus couldn’t get me.

I primarily end up using LLMs through DuckDuckGo’s private frontend alongside a search, so if my current search doesn’t yield the correct answer to my question (i.e. I ask for something but those keywords only ever turn up search results on a different, but similar topic) then I go to the LLM and ask a more refined question, that otherwise doesn’t produce any relevant results in a traditional keyword search.

I also use integrated LLMs to format and distill my offhand notes, (and reformat arbitrary text based on specific criteria repeatedly for structured notes,) learn programming syntax more at my own pace and in my own way, and just generally get answers on more well-known topics a lot faster than I would scrolling past 5 pages of SEO-“optimized” garbage just designed to fill time for the ads to load before actually giving me a good answer.

I have never once found an “AI” feature integrated by a corporation useful.

I have only ever found “AI” useful when it’s unobtrusive, and something I chose to use manually. Sometimes an LLM is useful to use, but I don’t need it shilled to me inside a search bar or in a support chat that won’t solve my problem until I bypass the LLM.

There are people who think that “positive” or “negative” words have a magic-like effect on natural processes.

From what I’ve seen, this was originally popularized in 2004 by Masaru Emoto’s book “The Hidden Messages in Water,” where part of his claims were that snowflakes would develop differently in containers labeled with negative or positive emotions.

Naturally, this turned out to be a complete lie, but many people, such as those in the original post, still believe that words can somehow influence things like mold development on food.

I love this approach, balances user freedom & privacy with moderation & voting pattern analysis by the public.

ActivityPub might mean some data is slightly less private, but that doesn’t mean it has to be.

I feel like this says more about these students’ schools, rather than the students themselves.

How have I never heard of this before!? I’ve been looking for exactly this for ages now.

Already spinning up a docker container!

Here’s a great mini comic that explains that paradox I picked up a while ago:

You will eat here, and you will be happy about it! 😡

It’s because they’ve conditioned their audience to believe a few key things:

1. “Voting” with your wallet is what matters over all other forms of action.
2. Giving money to “woke” companies harms you as an individual.
3. Buying products is the best way to signal your value as a person.

Let’s break that down.

They want money to be more important than voting, because they understand that their political demographic does not win the popular vote in most cases, and their policies are inherently not popular with the majority. But when they can get money instead, then use that to influence votes and policy, well, that just might get them the policies they want without substantial votes from the public.

They want people to fear giving money to “woke” corporations because it makes them seem like the only source of real truth, and objectivity. They’re the voices of reason in a world that’s all against you. Then, you’ll be willing to pay for their subscription streaming service, and their subscription streaming service for kids, and their merch, and their chocolate, and their razors, et cetera et cetera.

They want you to associate buying products as the way to define yourself, because when you so strongly identify with their politics, you’ll spend as much money as you can signaling to those around you that you don’t support the “woke” agenda through your wallet, you only support those who truly embody your cause. Giving them money becomes a symbol of your values.

And of course, they wouldn’t get any sales without this as a selling point. If they just start a razor brand, not affiliated with their political ventures, who’s gonna buy? Their razors are effectively the same price as Gilette’s, just without the likely higher standard of quality and availability in physical retail locations.

But when they combine all three of those tactics I mentioned to make their target demographic believe they need these razors to display their values, stop a perceived evil agenda, and make their voice heard… well, then you’ve got a good revenue stream.