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[54🌻] Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?#Tournesol is an open-source web tool made by a non profit organization, evaluating the overall quality of videos to fight against misinformation and dangerous content.
Spoiler: It’s an ad.
I’m starting to think that Kurzgesagt is either paid media and/or propaganda. I really liked their well researched approach. But this one is straight out in your face. They outright deny the filter bubble that each one of us have experienced firsthand on corporate social media - and then blame you for the ill effects. Also, if you look at the imagery - the emoticons and especially the thumbs up symbol, they are trying to invoke memories of specific social media. It feels very much like they’re trying to garner sympathy for those antisocial-media.
BTW, this isn’t the first time their motives have been called into question. They have in the past, taken money from bigphrama to paint them as benevolent superheroes.
I don’t know why you would think they’re paid media or propaganda. It’s not like they’ve been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a “philanthropic” organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of “effective altruism,” an ideology which functionally equates to “let’s try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality,” and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It’s also not like they’ve been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.
Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s
Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread? The internet is so vast, social media makes up a tiny sliver of it.
The real problem with the internet isn’t Facebook or Twitter or Reddit, it’s the fact the entire experience is pretty much controlled by Microsoft and Google. As they shape your content, lock you out of areas and generally dictate what’s “legal” or even what gets found during your searches.
It’s no longer an information superhighway but rather turning into a giant storefront. And that’s the problem. I search for anything and the first 3 pages are Amazon link backs. Or fake websites with AI generated content used only for ad impressions.
Facebook and the like definitely erode some parts, but as a whole, there is way more fuckery going on by big tech.
And this isn’t even mentioning the tracking and fingerprinting and violations to privacy and security we are all promised.
Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread? The internet is so vast, social media makes up a tiny sliver of it.
Because to most people outside Lemmy the “internet” (by which they mean the world wide web but that’s me being a pedant) IS social media. There might as well not be anything outside the walled gardens of social media to them because they’ve been conditioned to only stay on one, maybe two platforms for years at this point. The old “what’s a browser?” question these days gets answered with “I don’t need a browser I have Facebook”. Completely nonsensical to us but to them it’s totally natural. Not being derogatory about them or anything but the 60k lemmy users and however many million on Reddit are not the majority. Facebook with it’s 3 billion (with a b) users, IS the majority of the internet.
I recently (yay Black Friday Week!) got asked by someone in their 70s, who never worked with a computer, to help them pick a laptop:
- Me: OK, so what do you want to do with it?
- Them: I just want to login to the internet.
- Me: […] You can do that on your phone.
- Them: But how do I go onto the internet.
- Me: Use the browser to go to the webpage you want, or search for it in Google.
- Them: So I have Internet on the phone?
- Me: Yes, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to watch YouTube, read your mail, or access Facebook.
- Them: [unconvinced] And should I upgrade to a smartphone?
- Me: [facepalm] You already have a smartphone.
- Them: Oh, and I don’t want TikTok.
- Me: You don’t have TikTok.
- Them: [pointing at the YouTube icon] This isn’t TikTok?
- Me: No, that is YouTube [damned be the Shorts]
They still want a laptop, which is fine, even if they don’t know what for (“not for gaming, not for fancy rocket stuff like you do”) after having showed them some basic office stuff on mine. Still not sure whether to recommend them a Chromebook, a tablet, or what.
The second half sounds a lot like an ad for Lemmy ^^
Algorithm-free solves a lot of problems.
Algorithm-free
I’m not sure you understand what an algorithm is. They’re simply a sequence of steps you apply to get some end result, comparable to eg. a recipe in baking.
Lemmy still has multiple ways for you to choose how posts are sorted; “hot”, “active”, “new” etc. Each of those is an algorithmic sorting, and there’s literally no other option except to have an algorithm that is used to determine which posts you see
edit: I think many people who think Lemmy is “algorithm-free” may mean that it has a transparent algorithm for post selection. It’s still an algorithm, but we can all go look at source code and documentation to be able to know exactly how it works – with eg. Facebook the exact workings of the post sorting algorithm is secret
Super not enthused with how centrist this is. Comes off as more of the “can’t we all just get along and live in unity??” stuff people say, when really they mean “the left needs to chill and stop making everything a big deal.”
Kinda hard to just ‘get along’ when the other side is trying to destroy democracy and strip large portions of the population of their basic human rights.
I mostly agree with you.
But I also think it’s important to think of the neighbors we disagree with very differently than how we view right wing politicians and corporate executives. Our neighbors may have some shitty opinions and ignorant positions, but they might be decent people at heart. No right wing politician or billionaire CEO is going to be decent at heart.
I’m not sure where you live, but living/growing up in the south… I can tell you that those beliefs run deep. Deep deep deep. Deeper than you can fix by just being pleasant to your neighbor.
If you try to talk to them with kindness and openness, they dig in their heels and start spewing fox news talking points like it’s the most obvious thing in the world (I’m pretty sure they like it so much because it confirms every awful belief they already had). Try to present different sources, they’re rejected as fake news. I’ve tried everything with people around here since before 2016 and nothing seems to help. Mostly I just keep to myself.
Living in the south, if you’re not indoctrinated, is very isolating. Even living in the cities doesn’t really help. You still need to dig deep and look carefully for people who don’t think you deserve fewer rights.
Edit: thinking about it more, I think the isolation is the point, and it’s how so many people in my state believe some of the same basic things when it comes to religion and politics. You learn pretty young around here that if you don’t get with the program, you’re not going to have many friends. If you didn’t go to church, especially, you lost out on most of the community’s socializing for the week. It feels very cliquey in the smaller towns especially, almost by design.
It seems that americans think the entire world is the american south. Generally in more civilised places outside of the U.S, people care less about other people’s beliefs.
I definitely don’t? I was just providing my experience for the place I live. Obviously not all places are the south…? And good for you on your ‘more civilized place’, but we’re not talking about those areas.
Seems to me that, to solve rent crisis, Americans should just move into Europeans’ heads, since we seem to live there rent free already.
I think that was a stab at you saying “living in the south” as if it automatically meant south of the USA. So your US-centric world view shines through. I think no one wanted to attack your world view per se, but rather your bias.
And regarding your second comment, why so passive-aggressive? Obviously the US lives in everyone’s head rent free because it messes around with the whole world. Don’t get offended by people trying to point out that there is more in the world than one single country.
I get that, I live in the south of my country too, but only the US feels entitled enough to say “the south” and expect the whole world to know where they are.
I guess it adds to the problem that it’s very context specific. When you are in your country talking in your mothertongue with someone, you would probably only say “the south” to refer to the south of your country (or another by society predefined south).
And while we are on a mostly English-speaking platform inhabitated by mostly US people, I’ve heard US people throwing around US specific terms in a lot of different contexts/countries without checking the context they are in.
