swed420

> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

There's no reason you can't abolish login walls while still serving ads.

> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free

Capital interests have this innate expectation that everything must be profitable.

This vision is ripe for the picking:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Reddit is still viewable, though they did finally axe "old" reddit for those not logged in.

But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.

> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content

They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.

Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.

> are slaves to a misaligned reward function that encourages optimization of a metric (profit) over human values, even at what they claim is the risk of extinction

This was already the case even before the "frontier AI" age. The big question is, will these glaring AI arms-race threats be obvious to enough people to rethink the underlying systemic flaw driving it all?

Not holding my breath on that one.

> They are still liable for its actions and the OAI board should be charged with a felony/felonies for this.

You're right in theory, but in practice this hasn't been the case, at least so far.

They just need plausible deniability, which is trivial to manufacture at this stage of the game.

"Oops our black box went off the rails. We'll add better logging and alerts next time around."

> It's probably lot more efficient to actually openly embrace shorter work hours

This bill proposes that:

https://www.newsweek.com/new-bill-32-hour-work-week-how-it-w...

> It is way cheaper long term.

Plus the collection can be inherited by somebody later. If they don't want it, it could be re-sold at second-hand prices.

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).

> that doesn't want this to be a big story

That's a bipartisan sentiment as far as politicians are concerned. They pass it around like a hot potato and give it brief lip service only when it suits them.

Anything to distract from class politics. It seems to have worked.

(certain strains of feminism do acknowledge the relevance of class variables, but the mainstream ones avoid it like the plague)

Your experience resonates.

This gives me a ray of hope, if a bold enough group of people are willing to give it a shot:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

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.

> Deep pockets + simple control = perfect culture to just hire talent and let them go wild without worrying about financial viability, as long as the king CEO is fine with it that is

To expand, he also has knowledge and hands-on experience in this and related fields.

Just like the founder of Xerox PARC.

My goal was to share complex things I've learned through IRL experience, and explain them in detail.

Unfortunately in my case, I can't justify the distilling/production time sink unless there is some kind of monetary incentive. I already donate time to other projects, and there's only so much time in a day.

YMMV

I need at least some form of income to make it worthwhile, though. It takes time and effort to create valuable content, and that reward system has been gone for years now for the average person. Just isn't worth it.

In recent years I've thought about making blogs, videos, etc to share knowledge, but the incentive is just no longer there. Even before AI, youtube/web search/etc had plenty of problems, and now they're compounded.

It's probably the mozilla ceo

> Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself.

This is a problem brought on by AI, and does not seem fair to imply it's Ladybird's problem to solve.

Writing a browser/engine from scratch is a massively ambitious undertaking by itself. I don't expect them to also solve the tangential AI problem that every other open source project is contending with. Others can step up for that one.

> This is like suggesting fruit and veg could outcompete heroin.

No it's not.

> You can't entice users to a better social network when their addiction to the old one has been engineered to near perfection.

Sure, not with that attitude. But the article clearly articulates why better platforms could easily exist. Current platforms are filled with bots and slop that makes people hate themselves. The new platform would easily sell itself, and it need not be destructive like you're implying.

> There's good reason that our present (and really truly good) alternative social networks haven't taken over Facebook's users.

None of the existing alternatives are without problems, and the article spells this out in detail.

When we have a captured government and unaccountable corporations like we do, it seems like the best route is to compete with them via carefully designed not-for-profit products which contain strictly good features and none of the enshittified ones, as brainstormed here:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Building something as described in that article would cause people to drop all of the existing platforms almost overnight.

> Who would have thought we’d see the U.S. start imitating Russia in more and more ways like this?

Adam Curtis saw it coming a long time ago.

> you need to act on the regulatory level

This. Otherwise it's just a fruitless game of whac-a-mole as new reptiles inevitably step up to sustain the profit opportunity.

But the previous administration denying a fair primary process gave us the present one due to forcing an unpopular candidate. They collude with each other so much that they're effectively one party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty

> The masses will never use HN

That's a feature I'm thankful for.

> they are control freaks over speech - they don’t let people share their opinions and they are too ban happy.

I constantly shit on capital interests here, and am thrilled they tolerate it considering what YC does as a company. This place has extremely fair moderation compared to basically all other platforms, including X (don't forget about rampant dark patterns).

> A guy like Dang will never make anything people want because he gets off too much on shutting people down.

I don't know him, but that seems absurd based on all posts I've seen by him. Also, if you want something so bad, build it yourself or stfu.

The discussion above is in the context of presidents and presidential candidates. So far, zero progressives have been allowed to enter that race without being sabotaged by the party, to their own detriment. That's the party's self created problem to contend with.

Bernie ran under the Dem party, even though every corpo-Dem made sure to point out that he wasn't a Dem. To most people, that's a feature. Your loss though for blindly supporting the party that sabotaged their best candidate. There's a reason Trump feared the prospect of debating him. Fortunately Dems never let that happen, so congrats on that.

Your post history is full of establishment boot licking, so I frankly give no fucks what you think about mine.

> both sides

Your type has only one line, don't you?

Tell you what, the next time somebody like Bernie Sanders comes along, don't stab him in the back a thousand times. Then you might actually have a chance at beating that gameshow host one day!

Student loan forgiveness is DOA since it fails to target the root problem: inflated tuition prices.

As for unions, ask the average union member what they thought of Biden's presidency. Clearly you weren't paying attention when these issues were making headlines and Biden was looking like the POS that he is in that regard.

It's all fluff, and you were swooped up by it. Get a grip or don't be surprised when your party keeps losing to a gameshow host.

> People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action.

They also tend to use polarizing identity politics that vilify all men, or all old people, or all white people, etc, even though most of those groups are suffering with everybody else.