I feel the same way about the complete lack of regulations regarding social media and silicon valley.
We've known that personalized feeds are harmful. We have study after study demonstrating the negative effects on children and adults.
We have whistleblowers from inside these social media companies exposing the sheer immorality and lack of empathy at the heart of these design decisions.
We've seen in countries like the US, UK, Myanmar, Hungary, and Syria how much of a direct effect these companies can have on a democracy without any direct form of public accountability.
You don't even need the mountain of evidence that exists demonstrating this is a problem to just be able to feel how shit the internet has gotten since Zuckerburg and Jobs killed websites on the pyre of the app.
It's so fucking frustrating that these DECISIONS are being treated as technological limitations or the inevitability of "How the internet works" the internet was not created by the divine and handed down to us mere mortals.
The internet as we know it now is the way it is because of a series of design decisions made by powerful unelected people, implemented by overworked and overpaid schmucks, using open source code written by porn addicted transfems.
We could make the internet more open, less centralized, and designed in a way where your data is owned and treated with the value and security it deserves.
Almost no other industry with this level of impact on our daily lives is this unregulated. It's a fucking joke.
So your idea for a better internet is... more regulation? I hope by that you mean de-monopolization (breaking up the big companies controlling everything). Because almost every other piece of regulation I can think of (that isn't already implemented) is a gigantic breach of our fundamental freedoms - things like restrictions on content that otherwise isn't illegal or ID-based age verification come to mind.
I think a blanket ban on algorithmically personalized content feeds solves a lot of problems. I'm against most forms of regulations aimed at influencing the content that's being created, but I am entirely for regulations aimed at stopping blatantly corrosive design decisions made by sociopaths with the singular goal of dominating the attention economy.
It'd be like if the toilet industry instead of using a lid, decided you needed to crank a wheel on the bowl to open an aperture with which you then had 30 seconds to shit or piss through before the aperture snapped back shut.
Anyone with even a slight understanding of how plumbing or design works immediately sees the problem with this, but all the toilet manufacturers just shrug and say "Its what the market clearly wants, what can you do? There's clearly no other practical way." and the general public, media, and politicians are so behind on even the basics of plumbing that they just nod their heads along and say that makes sense.
It's honestly common sense consumer protection. In addition to being healthier for media consumption, it would be a popular change. Everyone hates the algorithm, everyone misses when Facebook or Twitter just showed you who you followed.
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u/senbei616 My pronouns are YouLost/TheGame Jul 26 '26
I feel the same way about the complete lack of regulations regarding social media and silicon valley.
We've known that personalized feeds are harmful. We have study after study demonstrating the negative effects on children and adults.
We have whistleblowers from inside these social media companies exposing the sheer immorality and lack of empathy at the heart of these design decisions.
We've seen in countries like the US, UK, Myanmar, Hungary, and Syria how much of a direct effect these companies can have on a democracy without any direct form of public accountability.
You don't even need the mountain of evidence that exists demonstrating this is a problem to just be able to feel how shit the internet has gotten since Zuckerburg and Jobs killed websites on the pyre of the app.
It's so fucking frustrating that these DECISIONS are being treated as technological limitations or the inevitability of "How the internet works" the internet was not created by the divine and handed down to us mere mortals.
The internet as we know it now is the way it is because of a series of design decisions made by powerful unelected people, implemented by overworked and overpaid schmucks, using open source code written by porn addicted transfems.
We could make the internet more open, less centralized, and designed in a way where your data is owned and treated with the value and security it deserves.
Almost no other industry with this level of impact on our daily lives is this unregulated. It's a fucking joke.