My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty much hate what it has become. 16 years down the drain.
I use these apps a lot because I promote music I make... I don't really use black hat techniques to do so, but many people who do are completely robbing creator funds and getting far more exposure than most of the honest and most talented creators all combined. The platforms favor memes and things that don't promote any business outside of the platform, so it's made psychological manipulation and subtle suggestion very popular in pretty much every video. The endorphin rush people used to get is dying as videos turn more and more hostile and shockingly towards influencing viewers consumerism habits.
I think ethics are everything though, so I don't leverage my black hat development knowledge against platforms just to be heard, and don't waste tons of money on ads like the highly viewed accounts do... Accounts try to manipulate you into giving them your money, the platforms work to manipulate you into giving them your money for ads, it will eventually wear itself out once the money dries up or people catch on that most people on these platforms aren't really making good money, except for the platforms.
I try to always post non-psych-manipulative music related things for followers as well as cynical shitposts in protest as the platforms slowly direct my views towards overseas viewers that will never really purchase nor stream my music. It's rather grim, but I'm sharpening my video editing skills, and it motivates me to keep making music that I can take to whatever slowly corrupted social shit show comes next... touché!
I’m now in talks with a foundation who is building communication tools for social and public initiatives. I don’t know if the idea will work out in the end but there are alternatives worth pursuing.
I really don’t understand the engineers and designers working at Facebook and similar companies. They cannot all be ignorant. There has to be some cultural angle of disdain for the regular user at play.
it's because any way to make money that is currently legal (but some might consider unethical) is the fittest agent in the darwinian natural selection of economic competition.
So any ethical businesses who forgo a more profitable, but slightly less ethical method, would be out-competed. Over time, therefore, what remains must be businesses whose ethical consideration is trumped by profit considerations.
Instagram is following this exactly - tiktok has better retention and user engagement using the dark patterns, and instagram would not survive if they can't keep up.
So it's really up to the law to set the standard. Akin to how in the old days, environmental protection laws don't exist, and the environment is polluted, there needs to be laws to protect the consumer's "digital environment". Unfortunately, the law is slow to catchup - i doubt i will see it in my life time, and often, the law only catches up after significant damage has been done.
No one makes you work for casinos, big pharma, anti-human-rights political groups, or surveillance capitalism companies.
If you work for an unethical company you share responsibility for the harm they do.
If a company you work for is behaving unethically, quit, and find another job. I promise it is an option.
Making unethical behavior illegal actually does have an impact on what people do because it changes their cost/reward decision
- I'm not sure, though the reasoning may be that their future existence is ultimately more valuable as a population control system than merely an ad network.
- Some have argued that online ads are in a bubble. I don't know.
- A free market does not seem to exist though.
Thoughts?
I've looked at some ad spending stuff at companies in the past and while their official numbers always "added up" there always seemed to me to be huge logic gaps that missed lots of obvious overspending. Those things are always hand-waved away as some sort of force multiplier or other nonsense. AKA don't cut our budget or sales will go away we dare you!
I've posted a longer comment on here about an adventure in cutting ad spending at a company I was at because of a minor feud I had with the marketing manager. There were huge areas where the cost/profit from ads was destroying profit margin. I made some tremendous efforts to prove we could make major spending cuts on advertising without losing sales to the owner and ceo and was successful. I probably would not have been able to do it if the marketing guy was not constantly blaming their failures on IT so I stood up for us by spending my personal time making accurate reports and dashboards about the spending and proved him wrong. (he and a couple others lost their job) (no they didn't stand up and clap its a real story)
Not sure if you are sarcastic or not. I totally blame them. I mean would you ask your drug dealer how to quit drugs?
But dark patterns abound, and mobile gaming is largely a hell of monetization and slot-machine mechanics.
I know my iPhone can render excellent graphics, I played to level 60 on Diablo Immortal then got out before they could extract more than $10 from me!
Most of these startups are aimed at improving access via telemedicine, accessibility apps, price comparison apps, etc. I'm not sure what you're imagining.
But I'm acknowledging that for me personally, working for, selling my talent to and/or profiting from the "healthcare" industry as it exists today without a universal option to provide healthcare to every American, full stop, is a breach of my own ethics.
Become backend developer. Pretty much everybody needs them.
Facebook is a cesspit of delusion and the "metaverse" initiative they took takes us to a point of no return for all their apps. Tiktok I would say is even worse given how we basically have millions of young teens oscillating on the borderline of being "famous" and sexualizing themselves. Stay away from such social media platforms or those that offer completely "free" products and you are good.
Whether it's enabled or not, Lidar is military-grade tech that has no place on most cell phones,
Let's not act like the entire industry isn't heavily invested in data collection... It does damage to real discussions about privacy and consumer protection for everyone.
encryption is military-grade tech too.
https://www.opentopography.org/blog/iphone-lidar-application...
How about the touch screen/keyboard?
Lidar is completely different tech that can scan an entire room, faces of everyone in it without their consent, and even devices and products in the room with you, even things out of camera view.
Vastly more invasive, and most people are completely unaware it is on phones now and what it can do.
C'mon man... It's not an argument point, it's necessary privacy threat awareness.
Lidar will struggle with items in the room as it is simply an depth detection tech so it will simply see a box, rather than chocolate chip cookies.
I think lidar is an odd one, that's all. Phone cameras are significantly worse for privacy.
Anything painted green and sold for 10x the price is military grade.
You can get Lidar on all sorts of civilian applications, from height mapping on drone photography, to driving assistance on cars. The lidar on phones is over-kill, depth mapping in photos or cheap crappy AR are not great use cases, but that doesn't make it a privacy problem.
The problem is that software engineering is my only marketable skill. I've fallen into a trap.
Perhaps it’s time that bright, young, talented minds are dedicated to solving Real Problems again in the world.
I don't think you'll get the huge audience of these other platforms. That may be a feature.
The nice thing with IRC, though, is that by not being one massive centralized entity where all channels in existence reside, you’re not depending on one particular network in the same way you might be dependent on services like Discord. You can run your own server for your own community where you can set your own rules and manage everything the way you want to.
IRCv3 also has SASL [1]. And more rudimentary forms of authentication have been around for ages on most servers.
Lord have mercy on all the inexperienced kids and others who just want to create videos and have them seen when they try ads... A lot of experimental money is gambled away on ads daily... I'm pretty sure it's a big pile of income annually for platforms.
I am a -lot- happier. Also as an independent contractor I have more control of the tools I use and am free to use and support only open source software on my workstations.