While there are technical solutions to that problem, realistically it's only a problem if people start thinking they're celebrities. Personally I prefer a platform that lets people dunk on celebrities.

Similarly, if the Earth can't survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.

I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn't be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it's something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.

It isn't sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.

I browsed 4chan /x/ earlier today, so here's where they are...

The obvious one relates to the fact that founding members of the Federal Reserve were on the Titanic, and it was intentionally sunk to (something incoherent about economics). The submarine was sunk for similar reasons.

The Titanic didn't sink, but it was some other vessel, and They had to sink the submarine so the truth wouldn't get out.

There are deep ocean aliens, and the sub had to sink to conceal that fact.

Those are the ones I could remember. In any case, it's always the Jews and the CIA.

Mine is that a cellphone should be a phone first, instead of being a shitty computer first and a celllphone as a distant afterthought.

It's even more perplexing than that... One version of Web 3.0 is the crypto fantasy of being nickel-and-dimed for every single little thing. There's another, older Web 3.0 concept proposed by Tim Berners-Lee called the semantic web.

Even apart from that, it implies that a sixth grader is not only a gay furry, but he has no problem letting his teacher know he's a gay furry.

This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I'll spell it out.

There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you'll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it's because there's a ton of stuff about the world you just don't know.

If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.

This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We're capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.

Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.

They should just start posting rules. You know, screenshots of laws, photos of stop signs, warning labels...

I think not caring about being cool only amplifies preexisting coolness. An entitled boomer isn't gonna become cool just because they're even less self-conscious about their obnoxious opinions.

Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn't even bother trying. But I guess you don't need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.

So we've moved from implosions to explosions.

Then you should head on over to 4chan.org, where you can be an obnoxious child to your heart's content.

Probably the biggest issue is getting all the "find a community" stuff together: the communities for new communities, and the crawlers that list communities and let you search them.

Well... They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don't have a lot of privacy. It's necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.

So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can't be stopped.

It seems to me, the dangers are more like...

Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.

It'll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Then yes there's EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I'm pretty confident the Lemmy developers won't give them the time of day.

We'd need to see their financials, which is tricky since they aren't public yet. There's also the issue, Steve lies about everything, so should we believe he's telling the truth?

But my guesses would go like this:

Since they've been spending other people's money, they probably haven't been watching expenses closely. Their P&L is probably dominated by payroll and rent. I can't help but feel that programmers are drastically overpaid, which is a symptom of the same issues, that there's a lot of other people's money chasing a finite supply of techbros.

The reason I think programmers are probably overpaid, by the way, is the number of man-hours they allegedly put in, versus the quality of their output. Reddit is a particularly shocking example of this.

In any case, the other people's money doctrine is to grow into profitability, which means burning money on spurious shit until some magic happens. Not exactly a winning business model.

People will believe some preposterous things to keep their beliefs intact. Capitalists somehow still believe that markets efficiently allocate resources, and any evidence they don't is chalked up to government interference or whatever. Christians believe that saying "God works in mysterious ways" and/or "that's the price of free will" accounts for how fucked up the world is. And communists believe that, when a communist does it, it's not an atrocity.

Of course, they'd charge you $300 for having to make the effort.

The castles are renovated into gaudy commercial establishments—one is a café, one is a privately-owned museum, one is a residential condominium, and one is torn down to make way for a strip mall.

When I was looking at conspiracy theories about the submarine, this was basically the metatheory. That they've so heavily brainwashed us that we can read something like this and go, yeah that seems realistic.