Honestly it was Disneyland compared to FB. Because it was a paid service they tried to keep it clean and nice.
It never would have hosted the kind of anti-vax-blow-up-the-government stuff and promoted it as prime content like FB.
It never would have hosted the kind of anti-vax-blow-up-the-government stuff and promoted it as prime content like FB.
The fact that you had to get the disk and pay with a credit card created one of the best online user experiences we had.
Bot farms is an ads problem.
The feed algorithm that maximize for 'engagement', in the same sense a traffic jam does, is the main culprit. Using Facebook, Instagram now gives you no power over what you see, just faint wishes that Zuckerberg somewhat fulfills every 4th post.
The most popular content on the service was astrology horoscopes.
Except for the "Eternal September" part of the park.
Disneyland has been operating for 70 something years and there are still thousands if not millions of first timers arriving every year.
Try that kind of curation and moderation in an online forum for people that size and within a week you'd have the right wing yelling about "cancel culture" and GOP senators calling hearings on Big Tech censors.
It resulted in the Web suddenly becoming open, and full of ill-informed opinions, and populated by large crowds of ignorant, obnoxious, know-nothing users, wearing cargo shorts, Hawai'ian shirts, and socks and sandals, wandering around, pawing all the exhibits.
The September That Never Ended was Good.
That's when the real money started to hit the Internet.
All those Teslas that average-level programmers are driving around, these days, are because of all those "tourists," and their loud shirts.
I am average programmer, but not SV. I still haven't been paid well enough to buy a Tesla.
It was just the "exotic" opinion of some anonymous user on the internet you will very likely never meet in real life. Crazy and colorful opinions made a lot of places interesting in the first place, meeting people completely different from yourself or similar to you in ways you could't or didn't want to share with close friends.
The demand that everything wrong should be purged from the internet is fairly recent. Today users demand conformity like they demand it from their TV and newspaper.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/pbmy5y/debat...
Wikipedia:
> The book emphasizes that Russia must spread anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S...Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms became publishing platforms for active measures (propaganda and disinformation) campaigns to promote Russian-style authoritarianism and diminish the influence of western democracy.
Once these platforms were given this evidence (widely published and released online by the platforms themselves), they took some steps to stop it.
Notable examples include populist movements such as the Trump campaign, state secession movements, white separatist movements, and more recently anti-vax movements. There are many more.
Facebook in particular has failed to stop the spread, and the site is widely considered by most outside experts as "captured" by foreign assets. This is especially true when it comes to QAnon and anti-vax content, which appears to be promulgated to harm western institutions.
In the case of at least one state separatist movement (and at least one white power movement, IIRC), both were revealed to have leaders who traveled back and forth to Russia and/or received funding.
I would also invite you to go back to the origins of the Trump campaign, and see how it evolved. It originally began as an active measure, with the Trump campaign hiring paid actors to promote his campaign announcement. There's a paper trail behind this, and several of his former staffers have come forward recently and admitted it.
You just described US foreign policy in South America and SE Asia.
Somehow people think the United States is too big or too exceptional to be the target of agitprop.
This theory is like a mirror image of what the empire is doing to the world.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49791/russian-dnc-ema...
Further, the successful use of cyberwarfare by Russia, is considered the leading example of its kind.
And I haven't even mentioned Brexit, or hundreds of other campaigns to weaken western democracies.
It's pretty clear that Russia leads in this regard.
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were worthless failures, and resulted in the loss of trillions of US dollars that could have gone to building American infrastructure, funding universal healthcare and education, and improving the lives of average citizens.
These invasions fundamentally weakened the US at home and abroad. They did not serve the interests of "empire" at all.
We seem to be talking about different things.