Just took em a second to figure out how.
Turns out all it took was algorithms promoting hate speech, conservative view points and other rage bait.
As soon as the algorithm become engagement based, instead of “positive reaction” based,
ie. algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative, when it used to promote posts based on positive reaction.
So now ragebait dominates most social media algorithms.
Yeah, it’s precisely why I stopped using every social media except the fediverse. It was toxic to my mental health.
I feel safe assuming it’s been similarly toxic to everyone else’s, just some people haven’t zeroed in on that being the problem.
algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative
ESPECIALLY if those reactions are negative. Rage and fear are THE top engagement drivers and engagement means retention means ad impressions means dollars.
That it also means the end of democracy is immaterial to the billionaire ghouls in charge, of course.
It wouldn’t be hard to enact laws regulating how algorithms are allowed to use views, reactions and downvotes. Metrics like “Controversial” and Reddit’s “Hot” (that sums upvotes and downvotes like they’re all the same) would be forbidden and governments could demand deactivation of metrics, algorithms or even the entire platform.
Of course such “anti-ragebait” regulations wouldn’t fix the issue but I believe it would significantly mitigate the overall state of nowadays internet.
People love to talk about how ‘the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.’
It’s easy to talk about big dramatic battles.
The truth is that it’s really a never-ending struggle that requires sweat.
How many people bother to show up for primary elections? How many are willing to get a petition signed to get a good candidate on the ballot?
I do those things constantly and the fact that other people don’t infuriates me.
It’s like a group project and I’m doing my part but we still all fail because nobody else gives a damn.
I hate democracy and people now.
On one hand I would love to kick the collective ass of all the people who sat the election out.
On the other, I know that I don’t have the power to change things without them.
Back in WW2 a lot of people had to accept that the British, the Soviets, and the Americans were the only thing standing between them and the Axis. They had to give up control of their forces and hope for the best.
The quote is that the tree is “refreshed” with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we’d be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won’t take even the simplest of actions until they’re forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it’s desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who “aren’t really into politics,” by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn’t enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
Question: What is the mythical height that American “democracy” has degraded from? The country was founded by a bunch of settlers who violently kicked out the people living there. They set up the government and immediately restricted who could vote and how much influence that vote could even have. They kept some people as non-human property. They spent the next ~century arguing about it until it had to fight a war about it and the result was to leave those people being merely treated as sub-human rather than non-human. Moving on to the 20th century, it took movements of labor and minorities that were met with extreme violence to get anywhere and that’s still left us where we are today, begging for crumbs and for police not to just execute people in the streets.
Then of course there’s all the people we invaded or otherwise screwed with who never even got a vote in the first place. Were they not “doing their civic duty?”
America has never been the experiment in democracy it purports itself to be. It’s a nice ideal to strive for, but in order to do that you have to stop pretending and recognize that there’s nothing to protect or repair. Nothing to go back to. Just something we’ve yet to build.
The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We’ve never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren’t all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don’t.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has entered the chat…
Look up the New Deal. Pretty good blueprint for a place to start.
if we want a breather we gotta upend the system.
not keep struggling with it.
Let me count the ways that upending the system isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
For the system to be upended in a meaningful way first means you’ve got an organized cadre in place. Savvy political operators who can make things happen.
The Left failed to get past the DNC twice with a popular candidate. The idea that the Left could get past the US Army is ridiculous.
Next, let’s look at what ‘upending the system’ would actually look like. Look at the hyperinflation in Germany after WW1. Or the Depression. Or maybe just the riots of the 1960s. Life isn’t a video game, and when the system fails the most vulnerable people are the ones who suffer the most.
Finally, do you really think that companies like Blackwater are just going to step aside and let themselves be swept away?
If the system goes down, it will be replaced by something much uglier.
none of the examples you came up with have anything to do with a worker revolution. yes, silly, it does takes time. and no, democrats have never been leftists.
do you have an actual idea to save the rest of that broken democracy? because its already being replaced with something uglier. you seem to think fascism is gonna stop itself?
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
We weren’t vigilant. Quite the opposite, in fact.
reminds me of this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Note, though, that the Panopticon is also referred to as a “prison design”. So, quite the opposite of “freedom”, depending on how you see it.
Or maybe mediums are inherently neutral?
I disagree. Few things are truly neutral. What people usually consider neutral is just what’s normal at the time. The structures within which we live and express ourselves are shaped by people and institutions.
I’m not taking about neutral as in in the middle. The medium through which you communicate doesn’t favor any message over any other. So it should only be judged based on how good it is at relaying messages, not who has more access to the medium or what they use it to relay.
The oligarchs got scared, then they got even.
Monetization of human weaknesses. By this I mean our biased, emotional, prone-to-addiction brains being colonized for data and ad-revenue.