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Why Allegro.cc Is Important AKA Social Media Is A Serious Thread To Humanity
bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Bob Keane
Member #7,342
June 2006

RmBeer2 said:

Those who don't want to use social networks are useless for large corporations. Google, twitter, facebook, discord, telegram, instagram, and other networks are going to unify their forces to exterminate all the useless in the society. When that day comes, it's time to be a fugitive. Who will be the leader of the resistance?

People who do not engage in social networking want little or nothing to do with other people. Why would someone like that want to be a leader?

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Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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jmasterx said:

So you're engaging with the platform. Perfect.

The software is trying to optimize for keeping you engaged and on the platform for as long as it can.

It's doing a terrible job. My earlier comment was a joke, so FB is using the same techniques for me that is uses for everyone else and it never suggests anything I'm vaguely interested in.

For a while I was getting suggestions to read articles from British and American newspapers, but I told it to hide all of those as I have no interest in America or Britain, so I don't seem to get suggested articles from there anymore. I even turned off New Zealand newspaper articles as they had no interest for me.

The rest of the suggestions are quizzes, which I've tried hiding, but the sites they come from propagate faster than I can hide them so I just ignore them as they only pop up once a week or so.

Apart from that I get sponsored content which seems to be suggested based on nationwide trends. Probably the reason I don't get any targeted specifically at me is because I never click on any of them.

One thing I've noticed is that FB doesn't base content on what groups you're a member of, as I'm a member of a vaping group and a Dutch recipes group and I never get any suggested content based on those. I'm also a member of a community group for my town and one from the last place I lived, and I never get ads based on either of those, just nation wide ones.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you don't engage with the platform, it gives up on you and leaves you alone.

As for Google. My newsfeed is a mix of national news, articles about Trump, and articles about whichever show I'm watching on Netflix. Sometimes I read the latter.

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

LennyLen said:

I guess the moral of the story is that if you don't engage with the platform, it gives up on you and leaves you alone.

That makes sense, and also, you're not in the coveted 18-24 age range so the platform cares even less about you.

And you're not exactly the normal on the standard curve, if they can capture everyone within 2 standard deviations, that's 97%, so that's plenty.

It's hard to imagine because they only think macro, and the people who are actually affected or targeted, are also not the set of people who talk about it on a forum :P

And some personality types are more easily influenced than others.

MikiZX
Member #17,092
June 2019

Haven't been in a right mindset to watch the documentary yet. But following this thread did bring to mind few things and posting them here in random order.

This song, in its parts, seems oddly corresponding to things you guys are saying:

video

The song, as lead singer James Hetfield explained, "deals pretty much with drugs. How things get switched around, instead of you controlling what you're taking and doing, it's drugs controlling you."

This kind of brings up Google-able term 'dopamine fasting'.

Youtube suggested Nirvana's 'Man who sold the world' and that one kind me made me think:
It's all just "good" showbiz. Entertainment.

The 'appeal' of the social media being that they are placing each of us in the center of the show. I think it is serotonine (?) which is related to 'feeling special'... a 'feel good' chemical.

The likely only long term concern really should be how well can human body operate normally with those chemicals' pathways saturated most of our waking life. People are experiencing burnouts from adrenaline. I guess the same might happen with serotonine, dopamine, and the lot.

For me A.cc is also on the list, chemical wise. :)

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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MikiZX said:

This song, in its parts, seems oddly corresponding to things you guys are saying:

I don't think it's really very odd. Social media was engineered to be addictive. Just like hard drugs are. Some say alcohol is on the same level as heroin for addiction. Alcohol addiction I know well. And my reaction when somebody tries to take a drink away from me (when drunk) is the same reaction my wife has if I attempt to take her phone from her. :P Suggesting that she goes ONE day without her phone has NEVER gotten any agreement.

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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bamccaig said:

Some say alcohol is on the same level as heroin for addiction. Alcohol addiction I know well. And my reaction when somebody tries to take a drink away from me (when drunk) is the same reaction my wife has if I attempt to take her phone from her.

I think what would be more telling is how you react when sober to the idea of alcohol being taken away from you.

For some people, it doesn't matter which drug is present, the addiction would be the same. For the general population however, heroin is more addictive. Most people who use alcohol can do so casually and not become addicted, but 25% of casual heroin users become addicted.

I tried opium once, and vowed to never try an opiate again as I knew if I did I'd never stop.

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

Another thing to consider is how destructive a drug is. Being addicted to heroin quickly destroys your ability to earn a living and a bunch of other things. So the effects are very quickly noticeable.

Social media could be just as addictive but we perceive it as less addictive because the rate of change to a user is much harder to perceive. Can you look at a 7 year heroin user and see the effects by looking at them? Probably. Can you look at a 7 year social media addict and see anything visibly wrong? Probably not. But talk to them before and after 7 years of social media then take a diff. But because the long term effects are harder to perceive, and the person is still a functional member of society, it's not seen as bad or addictive as heroin.

In fact, they need to engineer it so you stay functional. If they make it so you stop eating and going to work, that will no longer appeal to advertisers. Showing an ad to someone who can't consume products is useless. So a balance must be found. Which they can control.

Mark Oates
Member #1,146
March 2001
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MikiZX said:

The 'appeal' of the social media being that they are placing each of us in the center of the show. I think it is serotonine (?) which is related to 'feeling special'... a 'feel good' chemical.

"Feeling special", that's an interesting observation. In our (particularly most recent) culture, this seems to be a key philosophy. That, in addition to being "included" and "one of" the group.

That seems to be what's simulated the most. 🤔

Quote:

This song, in its parts, seems oddly corresponding to things you guys are saying

This is like the perfect song for a late 90s-early-2000s LAN party. ;D

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Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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It's hard to pinpoint exactly what the problem is. One could point to the internet itself as the problem, but I feel like until mobile phones made it always-on-everywhere it wasn't as bad. The death of real journalism (especially local) is sad and has had very negative consequences.

In terms of social media, it's a lost cause. Most of my commentary would be repeats of what has already been said, but it's largely because companies are purposefully trying to entrap people into using the app 24/7 (I've heard TikTok is the worst/best at this) regardless if the content is true or false, good or bad, etc.

If there were simply a cap on the number of followers/friends you could have and if there were no targeted advertising, then I think things like Twitter or Facebook could be great. But as long as one company has the floodgates open, then it's impossible to try to do anything else.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I think that advertising should be held to a standard, including on the Internet. You should not be allowed to lie or even stretch the truth in any way. Nor should fine print disclaiming the lie excuse the lie (i.e., no legal loopholes to get around it).

At the same time, publishers should not be able to push ads upon you to fulfill a contract. The way that ads are distributed should be done to enrich the user experience instead of exploiting the psychology of the population. If there were competition then one way to stand out would be to have the most unintrusive, genuinely helpful targetted advertising model. If it's unclear whether or not a product or service will be productive then it either should not be advertised to the customer or should at least not be targeted at the customer.

I'm not sure how you could define it precisely enough, but some sort of regulation or ban on technology that exploits human psychology should also be considered. This seems really pretty scary and dangerous.

LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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bamccaig said:

I think that advertising should be held to a standard, including on the Internet. You should not be allowed to lie or even stretch the truth in any way.

I once tried reporting a TV ad to the NZ broadcasting standards authority for false advertising because the advertisers claimed their product was chemical free. I got a reply back saying that the ad had been reviewed but that no standards had been breached.

Good luck policing the internet.

RmBeer2
Member #16,660
April 2017
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Standard, politics, spam, etc. They only use those nice words to clarify that they are right, each one does what they want in the end.

Before in medieval times they used to use heresy, devil, saint, etc. The purpose is to control people, it has never changed, we are still the same old idiots who never mature.

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Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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bamccaig said:

Could this potentially be behind the insanity in the USA right now?

It absolutely is. >:(

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what the problem is. One could point to the internet itself as the problem, but I feel like until mobile phones made it always-on-everywhere it wasn't as bad.

Human nature is the problem ;D

:-/

:(

:'(

The Internet as a technology is not the problem, neither is mobilizing that technology. It is that we have not regulated it in the same way we regulate other things. Millions were oblivious to the dangers of this as the technology progressed.

As a simple example, there is nothing stopping someone of any age from accessing pornography. In the "old world" you needed identification showing you were 18 years of age.

Things really fell apart when privacy disappeared, though. Everything you do is tracked. We hit the "I agree" button too many times.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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A magazine never asked how old the "reader" was. ???

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

Kids had no problem buying playboys from some older kids on the playground. The difference is before, you'd have that same playboy for months and you'd have to actually use your imagination to keep things interesting.

Now they have access to virtually unlimited amounts of these, which over stimulates the brain and is bad. We are over saturated with content and it is creating all kinds of problems.

Remember when you saved up and went to buy that new album? And you listened to that album every day for at least a few months. Now you listen to a song once and move on to the next 'fix' not actually taking the time to enjoy or appreciate anything more than a quick dopamine fix before moving on to the next thing. Something like an album which takes hundreds of hours of hard work by many people, is now just something you expect, and expect to get it for free. Once you've heard it once you never want to hear it again.

It's a little like having access to unlimited deserts. That's all you eat.

Movies are at least not total garbage, but many do fall into the formulaic maximize profit margin. But sooner or later people will stop going to theaters, and will watch movies for free with targeted ads, and probably targeted product placements too.

Every music video has Beats headphones product placement now days.

Think about that. The record label makes a music video, which is marketing material to sell singles. Then Apple pays for that marketing material in order to place their marketing material in the record label's marketing material. Apple pays to place an ad in an ad.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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LennyLen said:

Good luck policing the internet.

I'm not proposing we regulate every random Web site. Obviously that's infeasible. We only really need to worry about "big" Web sites. Essentially the ones big enough to be a problem.

I think that a Web will naturally police itself. The problem is companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are essentially monopolies. They don't have competitors. They can do whatever malevolent deeds produce the most profit. There's no underdog competitor that can steal the business away by being better.

This is partly an education problem. People are completely ignorant of what the Internet is, how it works, and why it works so well. What it's founding principles were.

There's also the dilemma that the platforms are proprietary and it's either impossible or inconvenient to switch platforms without making sacrifices (e.g., losing all of your history, or being disconnected from friends/family, etc.).

Perhaps we should also consider some sort of data sharing standard to keep data open and free, and prevent platforms from locking things down.

Of course, the real question is can Facebook and Google and Amazon do what they do for us if they don't do what they do against us?

Append:

Proprietary platforms are sort of like a telephone manufacturer 50 years ago coming out with a proprietary, encrypted protocol so that once you bought their phone you could only talk to other people with that phone. I wonder if history has learned this lesson before, and how many times...

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

That's a good point, imagine if your data was accessible using an api. Rather than create FB accounts people created OpenAccounts. and things like, who your friends are, and your profile (neutral data) is neutral data that must be openly accessible.

This way you can choose to go to a competitor social network, you still have all your friends, profile etc, you can still chat and send out status updates. The core social networking features would interoperate between social networks (remember when MSN people could chat with Yahoo people?)

And same thing applies to search engines, video sharing web sites. They all have a standard set of information that must be accessible from an api and you must be able to migrate and interoperate with any other platform implementing the standard.

This means I can write my own social network and immediately you can sign in and have access to all your FB friends, chat with them, etc.

Content specific to the platform (news feed, ads etc) stay platform specific.

That way the 'value' FB adds is its news feed and how it displays information to you rather than, well you want to stay in touch with family? FB

Eventually, just like how Windows was forced to give you browser alternatives, you have social network and search engine, and video sharing alternatives.

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I'm stoned right now, but I can't help dreaming of a peer-to-peer, "blockchain" network, but where the entire ledger isn't distributed to the entire network, but rather is "intelligently" fragmented throughout the network to keep enough redundant copies to make it still infeasible to tamper with them, but few enough that every user didn't need to download, store, and upload petabytes or more of data. :P

Of course, nothing would stop a particular user from opting in to hosting more of the network if they had the resources... This is still sounding potentially infeasible or at least unreliable, but I wonder if neither could be true. I think that's sort of the ultimate "sharing" technology. And could potentially make for a good backbone for what you describe, whereby the contents of your social media can move between networks.

This sounds a bit like Diaspora. I've dabbled with it a bit, but I haven't used it enough to really understand it. What I do understand is that it's a distributed network of hosts, and I think anybody can host a server. I'm not sure if it's an explicit feature of the network to move between servers, but I think the data is implicitly shared across the whole network.

That said, few people are using it. I think we can't really figure out what works and what doesn't because there aren't enough people using it. From what little I did use it it didn't seem to work very well. Or at least, I never experienced any interactions at all. :P

There definitely are people in the free software community that are interested in tackling this problem, but the proprietary nature of existing tools makes it impossible to gain market share. In particular without the billions of dollars of dirty revenue to throw at it.

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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A magazine never asked how old the "reader" was. ???

Yeah they did, if you peed on the strip and you weren't 18 it wouldn't show the pictures.

jmasterx said:

Kids had no problem buying playboys from some older kids on the playground.

I found one when I was 13 and I was suspended for giving out pages of it. The only scene I remember from that magazine was an icicle dildo. WTF ;)

The point of that simple example was that pornography use has negative sociological effects, and the rate of consumption and ease of access have increased since the Internet. You can find articles that disagree if you like (the Internet caters to both sides). If you search hard you can even find one that shows, rather incorrectly, that infidelity has decreased since the Internet.

bamccaig said:

We only really need to worry about "big" Web sites.

We only need to worry about our own families. This isn't something that will be "fixed".

Let them eat each other and lets get on with it.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

RmBeer2
Member #16,660
April 2017
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Really interesting.

Much of what you're talking about had also occurred to me during the development of a social network, but I have had many problems that were not viable.
Many of the ideas are not very convenient when it comes to making a profit. It may not be so much a problem that people have control of their own data, but you lose control yourself as the owner of the server. It's already known that people do not have any loyalty to anything, therefore it does not matter how kind or sacrificial you are, and then go into how you can support yourself or keep the server, which can only come from the people who use it, And if you don't force some kind of payment, they just don't pay anything.
After that, it comes in that you offer something free but in return you plug in any malware, sell their data or prevent them from leaving your platform with various tricks.
In the end it ends with the fact that people don't care what are the benefits that a network offers, they are simply absorbed by vice and only serve to be exploited. Although that's the mechanic that ultimately everyone uses, social networks not for the benefit of the people, but as a business to make money.
Do not forget that those who offer space on their disk with a server need to earn something in return, and that everything has finished as it is currently due to a series of needs, let's be honest, if these multinational companies steal countless amounts of money it's because it works , even if it's dirty, dishonorable, and unethical.

Even if you had the best social network that exists, you still have problems to make yourself known, especially if your network has a protocol or an open API, you need at least one organization that establishes a standard with weight over all. A standard API that allows information to be freely shared even if you change servers or the server dies.

I have already thought of many possibilities and ideas, I have mentioned a few relevant ones so as not to make it so dense.
It is important to take into account the needs of each one and how it benefits everyone.

Personally, I'm probably very demanding with everything, that's why I have done almost nothing, just think about many things, and write down some interesting things, but there are many things that scare and demotivate, especially that you do not earn any personal benefit. It also doesn't make sense to set up a server so that it dies the following week because you didn't have enough to support it.
A true social network is not profitable.

EDIT:
Maybe I'm wrong with the last comment, the fact that things should be free is surely wrong and it's nothing more than a garbage idea generated among the masses. Perhaps what works best is the usual buy/sell.

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MikiZX
Member #17,092
June 2019

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@Joshua, ..... Spotify adds 28 new songs a minute?! OMG

I don't quite understand this (how serious it really is) but it might prove to be a complicated thing:
Facebook threatens to quit EU after spat with Irish regulator

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

RmBeer2 said:

Much of what you're talking about had also occurred to me during the development of a social network, but I have had many problems that were not viable.
Many of the ideas are not very convenient when it comes to making a profit.

There's nothing wrong with running ads to pay the bills. Traditional media like TV, radio, magazines, etc have run ads in their content for a long time and it was not really a problem.

Google used to run ads based pretty much on your keywords only, which once again I don't think is that bad. If I search for diapers and see ads for various brands of diapers (for that query only), I'm okay with that.

Users should be able to opt out of seeing ads that use their data in some way to target them.

They should also be able to opt out of seeing recommendations / feeds that are personalized based on their data.

That way the news feed / recommendations would be based on traditional metrics like popularity or something.

That way you don't have an AI constantly using everything it knows about you and your behavior to keep you on the site. It can use whatever other data it wants, just not yours. That includes geographical data. Don't even show me things trending in my region. I'm just a random ip connected to your network. Do your best.

That way people at least have a choice and we can educate people on that choice.

MikiZX said:

@Joshua, ..... Spotify adds 28 new songs a minute?! OMG

Only 28? I expected much higher....

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Derezo said:

I found one when I was 13 and I was suspended for giving out pages of it. The only scene I remember from that magazine was an icicle dildo. WTF ;)

An older kid (who would have been 20 or so at the time) built a cabin in the woods that was literally full of porn magazines. I mean this cabin had to be something like 3 meters squared, and the outside walls all had countertops. These countertops were covered with layers and layers of porno mags. :P I couldn't guess how many magazines there were if I tried. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Our neighbour friends told us about it after they discovered it by chance. These friends, my brother, and I went to go check it out as soon as they told us about it. It was like finding heaven for boys our age (except a creepy, icky heaven..). And then my brother stole like 50 magazines, and built his own fort to store them in. :P I was probably about 13 at the time, and my brother was about 15. The other kids were about 13 and 14. I was too afraid of either getting caught by this bully, or of possible biological fluids that this cabin was surely covered in. :P I didn't really touch anything, but I looked.

That wasn't even the first access to porn we had though. When I was about 10 or 11 we were visiting friends of ours. Their father was a divorced police officer. Apparently he had a stash of playboys. I'm not sure if he gave his sons playboys or if they snuck them behind his back, but regardless they showed them to us. I remember one of the women had protruding labia minora and none of us knew what they were. The other boys were disgusted by it, but I was intrigued. :D I think by about 12 or so my brother had also figured out how to find porn on the Web, and had shared his knowledge with me.

Back in those days though the lingerie section of Sears catalogues was also effectively softcore porn for kids (or anyone else desperate enough). :P Especially the two fat catalogues that were distributed at Christmas and for summer. :P I made good use of those back in the '90s! Boys are innovative when it comes to accessing stimulating material. :P

RmBeer2 said:

A true social network is not profitable.

I wonder what you would need to charge the average user of a social network the size of Facebook to afford the cost. It's probably not prohibitive for most people. I bet most people in the West would be willing to pay $5 or $10 per month to use it ad-free. That is millions, if not billions, in revenue. It's probably a viable strategy for an ethical social network. I would gladly pay to use one that worked for me, but only if it also worked for my family, friends, peers, etc.

jmasterx said:

There's nothing wrong with running ads to pay the bills.

Not inherently, no. The trouble starts when the advertising is misleading or disruptive. Essentially when ethics are set aside and profit is the only motivator. Which probably started in the '50s or '60s and has only gotten worse.

Think about what false advertising really means: it means that products or services that don't work can still be successful. This is the epitome of waste. It exists because of this silly notion that every family needs to earn their own keep. And so instead of having your basic needs met you need to come up with some kind of hustle to convince people to give you money. There are only so many things you can do that actually work and are affordable and still profitable.

The worst are the products and services that do more harm than good to our world. These are literally destroying the habitats that are vital to our survival and the survival of millions, if not billions, of life forms on this planet. All in the name of "earning" survival. It's sickening.

jmasterx said:

Traditional media like TV, radio, magazines, etc have run ads in their content for a long time and it was not really a problem.

It really was becoming a problem, but the Web dwarfed the problems of TV advertising. A few problems with TV ads:

  • The volume was generally boosted on the ads so that when you left the room to get snacks or pee you could still hear the ad. If you happened to stay sitting on your couch though the volume was suddenly painfully high. Also if anybody was sleeping they are now awake and they're blaming you.


  • The ads often made outlandish claims that were outright dishonest.


  • The ads would simulate a product or service working perfectly, and imply that the product or service actually worked that well, knowing full well that it doesn't.

Kids are fully gullible to advertising. Humans are in general. We typically believe what we're told. Unfortunately, due to nefarious forces such as religion and politics we're not taught as a society to be skeptical. Instead we're taught to just have faith and believe. Only adults that have experienced false advertising before and/or consciously choose to be skeptical will be oblivious to the ads.

On a side note: if Axe body spray worked as well as advertised would it be rape to take advantage? If so does that imply that Axe is encouraging rape?

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