Call me paranoid, but a ton of money is at stake over platforms that used to be useful in terms of spreading information. And they’re both being tanked at the same time? During heightening ‘geopolitical tensions’? And in the face of a strange upcoming election in the United States where both platforms started and are based?
In Reddit’s case it’s simply a moron aping another; I don’t think that Huffman has the depth of thought necessary to evaluate the impact of his own actions.
Twitter is bought out by a raging right-wing sociopath who literally coups other countries for resources, purposefully affects public policy at every opportunity, and habitually pumps n’ dumps crypto and stocks, and you think it’s impossible for him to have destroyed the platform that used to be the international commons on purpose??? Please justify your reasoning, I can’t wait.
Apologies, I suppose. I read it as “perhaps, except in Twitters case.”
Apology accepted. I also apologise for the tone.
If you want my opinion on Twitter: I’m not too informed on the platform but I think that he did it on purpose, and due to stupidity. He is a right-wing sociopath and a moron with enough money to become too big to fail.
A smart but malicious person in Musk’s shoes would’ve likely introduced the changes slowly, boiling the frogs there, shifting the Overton window to the right, in a way that benefits rich people in detriment to everyone else - because that would benefit Musk himself. Twitter as “the international commons” makes it valuable for anyone to spread shitty discourses there, in a way that they reach governments directly.
But instead of seizing the tool for his own purposes, he broke it.
I’m going Hanlon’s Razor on the motive with everyone else here but the fact these platforms were so important to the last election and a failure to capture that influence is the reason they are sinking now. Anyone with a plan is definitely not succeeding and I’m not buying that any of this is 4D chess.
I think rich people are working really hard to try and get the republicans in power next election, that should probably tell you all you need to know about how to vote
Nebula.tv has some promise. It’s not free but it’s very cheap and creator-owned. Plus there’s no ads. But it can never be a true replacement for Youtube because it doesn’t allow just anyone to upload there.
My alternative to youtube is reading books from the local library and playing the guitar.
The decline of reddit and youtube especially has done wonders to my quality of life.
Newpipe is great, for me. I don’t have a steady stream of recommendations or shorts, just content I actually subscribe to and whatever is trending if I go there, or manually search for.
The infection of ads into every corner of Social media legitimately was making me a worse person, with a shorter attention span and no mental clarity.
Wouldn’t exactly say fashisim is to blame but rather simply corpos want maximize profit on a hinherently unprofitable business models. Like I’m personally not seeing much ideology getting pushed anywhere. Granted I hardly spend time on Twitter but all I’ve been seein on x is furry tits and on the other platforms just ads getting pushed. From what I can tell you can say what ever and no one will hear you over the ads.
I have Twitter completely blocked, just from the news alone it’s clear Elon is pushing a political agenda at the expense of the business, which means it’s the intended point, because he’s not dumb. It doesn’t matter what you specifically would see in your timeline these days, assuming you would follow better-than-garbage people. The platform is directly being advertised to the world as a place for fascist ideology to go unchecked. The people that know that, and stay on the platform specifically for that reason, are following a very different set of accounts and they’re getting a huge, daily dose of empowerment as Elon lets it flow freely, even engages in it regularly. Again, intentionally.
Twitter, instagram, facebook, reddit – DNS blocked on my network. The addition of that simple friction to viewing those sites has completely broken me of the crutch. [Plus the Murdock-block plugin and I’m in a great place.]
I went an extra step and made myself a Firefox add-on a few years ago. It takes a regular expression, scans all element attributes for values matching the expression, and applies a given CSS style to those elements. Given a pattern like… (Holy hell, you can’t really post a regular expression on lemmy, it’s trying to do some markdown stuff to it, but it involves the domains of all the sites I hate like twitter.com, x.com, facebook.com, etc…), and the style visibility: hidden, all links to those sites, no matter what page I’m on, are completely removed from my internet experience. I never see them.
Edit: Oh the regex issue was actually because my add-on was filtering the elements with twitter.com, x.com, etc. as it’s supposed to :) I can’t even see my own comment unless I turn it off.
Be warned, the UI is just a textarea that takes JSON and involves escaping characters for both JS strings and regular expressions in the same string. regex requires backslashes to escape things like ‘.’ and JS requires backslashes to be doubled to output a single backslash 😬 The example escaped JSON at the bottom of the options screen should be enough to figure out how to add your own domains to the list. The only reason it’s a public plugin is because it’s literally impossible to just run a plugin from a local source without having to do a ton of extra steps every time you start the browser. Also, you’ll occasionally get confused why things don’t seem right on the internet, like when I tried to talk about this plugin and mentioned twitter.com, causing my own comment to look messed up after I posted it, because the plugin was doing exactly what I told it to do :)
To me the most annoying part is everyone is so entrenched in youtube they either need to accept its a service they should pay for or start looking at migrating. There cant be any viable alternative if there isn’t an audience.
There are multiple workarounds for YouTube ads like Revanced on Android for example. On Computer I didn’t encounter any issues for using the uBlock Origin extension.
They have a few problems like demoneytising for arbitrary reasons, over zealous moderation on some topics and almost zero on others - I think things are starting to relax a bit but there was a time where history channels would avoid saying the word Hitler or Nazi in their documentary about ww2. Likewise if a film or news story has someone ‘commit the unthinkable’ and ‘unalive themselves’ it can make hard topics much more difficult.
There’s a lot of engagement spam too, so many channels doing fake restorations, fake pool building, fake animal rescues… Then the ones which just have an ai voice reading fake stories from Reddit, chat gpt gibberish, or awful old jokes copy pasted from old books.
There is amazing content too though of course and I think it’s by far the best place to get entertainment and education resources
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