> There used to be a time sites got punished if they treated searchbots differently..

Google is itself deep in the darkpatternmaxxing game now as well.

> There are entirely factual ways to describe January 6th, 2021.

That's the thing. People can't even agree on facts, even if they're obvious to an outside observer.

Don’t confuse lies with disagreements.

The Republicans understand the facts of Jan 6. It’s just not in their interest to be truthful about those facts. Which is another problem entirely.

You cannot disagree about facts

I had it write some code the other day, boy was it awful-looking compared to 5.6. Worked perfectly, but ugly nonetheless.

Sol 6 was a flop. Nobody would have cared if it was called Terra 6.

Ubuntu tried that at some point, but it never took off as a mobile OS.

I do this as well, and I hope Google never takes away the ability to look back in time.

HF is meant to be a single point of control. AI models and Linux distros aren't usually for normies, so distribution via torrents would make sense, especially to save the provider some bandwidth. Ubuntu has been offering torrent downloads for ages. No mention of torrents on HF. I believe most downloads will soon be account/EULA-walled.

TikTok isn't even safe for adults, let alone children.

I like to think there's a difference between being fed misinformation & braindrot day in, day out and having to look for them yourself.

Is YouTube or Twitch really better? I don't think people are going to go "Oh well, TikTok is gone now, guess I'll finally go read through my backlog of academic papers on quantum theory"

YouTube is has a lot of great educational content. Maybe TikTok is too, I don't use it, but I find most short-form content to be of questionable value.

[edited to change "full" to "has a lot of" because Youtube has plenty of brain-rot too]

Has a ton of short for content too

I'd say it is, if you stay away from shorts.

And every content creator on tiktok isn't going to move over to YouTube and start posting shorts, and every tiktok user isn't going to move over to Youtube and start viewing them?

I guess there IS a theory that the tiktok algorithm is UNIQUELY evil in some way. It's hard to argue against this theory, so if tiktok were temporarily banned, it would be a nice test. I think the theory would be flat-out proven wrong, personally.

Longform youtube is just as slop ridden. Arguably the shorts are more potent because they won't pad with even more slop into these long multi ad break videos of saying nothing ultimately.

This doesn't even have to be sarcastic. I mean the bulk of the internet is for sure just propaganda and misinformation meant to either part you of your vote or your dollar or both and we are just dumping it into the mindshare of the population and hoping things go well in the next few generations.

Mainstream distro users/contributors were too busy arguing that Debian is better than Slackware, Arch is better than Debian, Ubuntu is for noobs and now NixOS (whatever that is) reigns supreme. All that reduced the UX of these distros to the lowest common denominator, with varying degrees of skill requirements to get the thing working.

What if everything people wanted was a riced Arch/Ubuntu distro that was trivial to install on pretty much anything and not a lecture on how non-free drivers/software can't be included, leaving your machine unable to connect to the internet?

All this effort spent on making lists which dubiously include some of the world's biggest corporations, the creators of JavaScript, GNU and the opensource movement... instead of making something better? Not "ethical", just make something better.

You might argue that there are better distros out there, but has any other distro gained so much traction so fast since Ubuntu? And this even before a single cent was spent from all the 'fascist' donations.

I've come to hate Windows, to increasingly dislike macOS and to love Linux because I no longer have to spend my days ricing, recompiling wifi drivers for older machines and stuff like that. I don't have the time. Omarchy is worth it for me because someone else worked on this, passed it on for free and it just worked. Perhaps those big donators see value in that as well, and not just in some supposed power-grab?

> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute.

I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.

Bluesky has gotten considerably more tolerable by... adding an algorithmic feed ("For You"). It's developed by just some guy with the server running in his living room or something. I know people in this thread are down on algorithms, but a non-attention hacking algorithm is super, super nice because it helps cut out crap and show content in the niches I care about.

The reason that algorithmic feeds were introduced was essentially that Zynga and various heavy posters were killing Facebook (but mostly Zynga).

Back near the dawn of time, FB's feed was chronological, and that meant that Every.Single.Farmville.Notification showed up in your feed (and there were a lot of Farmville notifications).

This was actually causing real problems for Facebook, and they introduced an algorithmic feed to fix it. Back then, it was actually relatively simple, and mostly just ranked posts based on how connected you were to the person on Facebook.

Obviously things have changed since then, and algorithmic feeds have had a host of weird impacts, but a ranked feed is not necessarily bad in and of itself.

Algorithmic feeds make large "pile of all posts everywhere" social networks like Twitter and BlueSky viable IMO.

The mentioned "For You" feed for BlueSky appears to be a variation of LinkLonk's algorithm (by the same author), so how it works is partially known: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288

I get a LOT of untagged NSFW and political posts in my For You. I'm guessing it's influenced by the likes of people I follow. I don't know WHO to unfollow... and I don't really want to unfollow anyone.

I kinda wish I could influence my For You with rules:

> No more than 2 degrees of separation from me

> Posts with fewer than 150 likes

The problem with X is it forces you to hand over personal information to sign up, and even then many have said it leaves them in a "we're having difficulties" loop.

It might be a fair trade if this exchange of info helped them eliminate bots, but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.

> but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.

I used to get a lot of spambot followers, but that has ceased entirely in the past year. I would say the bot problem is no longer that relevant at the moment, but rather people posting AI replies are.

For some people it might be hard to tell or may even be non existent in their sphere of it.

But if it's blanket rejecting certain signups based on identity, that suggests the company is interested in censorship and echo chambers, which means who knows what other dark patterns and less-detectable bot nets it has behind the scenes.

Doesn't seem worth it imo, except maybe for people who want their opinion echoed back to them (as well as other momentum that takes time to dissipate).

Really this is the problem: the internet has enabled the global Hater community, who come together and find common cause in their hate, and that radiates outwards into everywhere else. Even if you're trying to define your place as "not that", it is influenced simply by trying to be negatively defined.

Not even specific to a type of Hate. Obviously it's the "big Hates" which are dangerous (and can get people killed), but even the "small Hates" such as "pop star gets cancelled for wearing the wrong outfit" or whatever nonsense is going on in kpop fandom are annoying.