After spending the past ten years or so being exposed to videos of Ukrainian, West Papuan, Hong Kong and Palestinian civilians being brutalized by their neighbouring countries, it certainly felt like a foregone conclusion that I was going to come across the video at some point.
It was one of the reasons why I left Reddit back in the day, their userbase’s obsession with posting, upvoting and even celebrating uncensored snuff shit (especially during the 'rona times when half the posts were people celebrating the deaths of antivaxxers and random members of the American public that’d fallen for the antivax propaganda.)
Even with the ‘this contains sensitive content’ filter being put on almost every insta post, one account straight up played it uncensored in the middle of a few memes, so now it lives alongside countless other fucked up things I’ve seen over the years of being online.
It’s almost like these social media companies know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. For what purpose, I can’t begin to speculate on without either sounding like some kind of schizotypal tinfoiler, or diluting the real societal problems by failing to address the millions of issues that have compounded until we got here.
DrFistington@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Yup. What’s fascinating is that when actual people were the ones developing and using the Internet to communicate(as opposed to companies and nation states), the community organically came up with methods of preventing this type of thing. NSFW, NSFW, GORE, spoiler tags, etc. and real people, by and large world voluntarily abide by these guidelines, because they understood that invoking PTSD in strangers is a horrible thing to do.
But when corporations got to the point that they didn’t need to listen to customers, just show and tell them what they should think, those rules of civility went away.
The problem was never your friends, neighbors, or countrymen. It’s that standards and practices based off collective and shared ideals, that have been established for centuries got pushed to the way side so some sleazy little cock weasels could monetize you to the point where you’re no longer a human, just an asset.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Its like once a hobby goes from a small group enthusiasts to mainstream it gets worse as corporations see an opportunity to monetize what was previously loser city. Like video games and old message boards and irc to what we have now with all sorts of monetization and tracking being shoved in as services gain critical mass among the general population.
Things seem easier to manage by humans at its infancy when its mainly people passionate about what they are using. I went from wishing fediverse to get big enough to replace mainstream social media to being fine with it being a smaller alternative. That initial small phase has kind of been the golden period for lot of things.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
well said!
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
So why is the problem not solved yet then? Those people are still around, many in core projects important for tech industry. Many with enormous capital.
The problem is always architectural - technical, strategic, tactical, economic, social, but all these are subject to architecture.
The architecture has, no ambiguity in that, defined the development of the Internet so that when it was not commercial and not basic, it was beneficial for communication attractive to people, which it needed to become commercial and basic, and so that when it became commercial and basic, it became beneficial for TV with feedback.
There is ambiguity in if that was intended by many, or if that was a slowly unrolling catastrophe.
Honestly instead of trying to turn the train back we should think of good continuations. There’s nothing else we have anyway, the past is dead.
Those people, maybe with totalitarian or grifter goals, have built us such a sophisticated and powerful system that there’s no way it remains useless for us. Of course we shouldn’t limit ourselves with their choices, but optimism is sometimes a useful resource.
There are niches platforms fulfill which otherwise are not fulfilled, well, one can imagine so many solutions for any problem of these I can take off the top of my head, that the actual limitation is lack of optimism.
So-o, until I’ve even started approaching my toy for the next weekends and the weekends after them and many other weekends, nothing more to say.
architect@thelemmy.club 5 days ago
I recall consistently attempted getting groomed as a child on the internet in the 90s. Rotten.com and all sorts of shit.