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Honestly, at this point, I'm on board with just banning social media algorithms entirely. No more personalized feeds. You can have a website that publishes whatever you want, but you can't tailor individual feeds to individual people. People can replace their "feed" with what the original internet was meant to be - visiting a series of websites. Want to read nothing but right wing blogs? Fine. You can spend all day navigating to different URLs for them. But no more spoon feeding individually personalized content to people.

It turns out that method of content delivery is just a very dangerous and damaging technology that really fucks with the workings of the human mind. If you tell AI to build an ideal feed model for a person, it builds a nightmare that traps human beings in skinner boxes.

We can ban these algorithms. We don't have to continue to tolerate their existence. And in the grand scheme of history, it would be no different than a thousand other things that we discovered, at first thought was a panacea, but eventually decided the benefits weren't worth the costs. Asbestos is a fantastic fireproof insulator, but we willingly let those benefits go in lieu of its severe respiratory effects. DDT is an incredible pest killer and insecticide, but it also was rendering entire species of birds extinct. Targeted, individually tailored social media algorithms create entertainment feeds that can entertain us to such degrees that the kings of old would lament their jesters in comparison. But what these algorithms are doing to us, what they are doing to our society? On political polarization? The effects they are having not just on children, but of people of all ages? We as a society need to recognize that the benefits just aren't worth the costs. We are tearing our civilization apart for the sake of cheap entertainment.

We need to ban targeted social media feeds. We have faced technologies like this before. We have made the choice before to give up the benefits of these things for the sake of the greater good. We've done it before, and we can do it again. It is time we ban targeted social media feeds.

The problem is that parents - apparently - have no interest in educating their children anymore. They just place their kids in front of a PC or give them an iPad so they can watch TV or something.

Forbidding people from accessing the internet is going to raise a generation of children unfamiliar with it and then drifting off completely. Just look at the NK soldiers when they were shipped to russia and first had access to the internet. Half of them became porn addicts.

The problem is unfettered access, not access at all.

Dude, we're all stupid. We are all effected by the Internet and propaganda algorithms. We are not superior, most of us just don't realise we're programmed. Exactly the same as Gen Alpha, Zoomers, Gen X and Boomers. We're all profiled and we all see how everyone else is a victim of indoctrination. That's how this works, social engineering innit?

is like letting them walk NYC alone at night during the 70s.

One can get smart doing such—at times very quickly.

Facebook was tame.

It's twitter, reddit, instagram, and tiktok that really set people off. They just weren't prepared to handle the forces at play when you let people communicate with no accountability.

Glad I grew up realizing that most people on the internet are just losers who can't function in the real world so they use the digital space as a crutch.

Really makes it easier to deal with the hysteria, apathy, narcissism, insecurity, and cognitive dissonance I see from many users.