Comment on Making The Internet And Our Devices User Friendly Once Again
Artisian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The topic is important, the timing is good (just in time for some new-years resolutions), and the writing is effective. Thank you for taking on the project.
I had hoped that the first suggestion in part 1 would be more accessible than ‘delete the accounts and create burner accounts’ - we’ve chosen the most effective but biggest ask, and I don’t think this post quite provides the infrastructure required for many people to make the change. FB is used by many folks as social media; the keeping track of friends, events, and family can’t really be done from a burner account (your messages alone will identify you entirely to meta).
And I have a personal pet peeve on this topic that’s triggered by the last section: I believe that mindfulness is a good way to improve internet use, but I think we’ve proven as a society that most people can’t implement this sort of self-reflection and intentionality without more structure. Where’s the tooling to remove dark patterns, automatically ask these questions after an app use, etc. ?
MacStainless@piefed.social 1 week ago
Thanks for reading and for the feedback!
My goal with the series is to start small and make it digestible for people to see they can make simple changes that make big results. I 100% agree there’s hurdles and more points to make, which is why I decided to write it as a series.
The goals I have is to show we don’t need to be dependent on the apps themselves, alternatives exist (fediverse, RSS, etc), and yes AdBlockers and recognizing dark patterns. To me, it’s a slow burn for people to see the way they hate the way things are can be changed, but IMO it has to be presented in pieces that don’t feel like a massive overhaul.
Artisian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
As you write up the alternatives (especially RSS and adblockers! These can be low barrier to entry), it would be great to link them from this part 1! I feel like the ask and text for part 1 is roughly the right size, but the action feels very big and scary to folks (and giving a reassurance early in the text that you can replace stuff and meet your needs might be helpful).