Comment on Australia to force social media platforms to allow users to opt out of algorithms

zleap@techhub.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  because these politicians know extremely little about the Internet

  I started participating in online communities in the 2000s. The “social media” we had back then was web forums, organized by topics and sorted chronologically. I was young enough at the time that it is now permanently stored in my brain that that is the normal way the Internet should be like, and everything popularized since then (recommendation algorithms, the idea that we should follow people instead of topics, even the idea that websites shouldn’t be specific to certain topics) is a deviation from normalcy.

  I know, rationally, that those deviations from normalcy are now the new normal (even the fediverse is “only” an attempt to improve further on that, not a move toward the Internet of the 2000s), but there is still a part of my brain that doesn’t accept this.

  But I very strongly suspect that those politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, who are now trying to regulate the Internet, never posted anything to a traditional web forum, or edited a wiki, or anything like that. To them, “social media” became a thing (at all!) in around 2008 to 2010 when they created Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to communicate with their voters. (Reality check: social media has been a thing since, at the latest, the 1980s, when Usenet was invented.)

  If they don’t know that the Internet is not Facebook, then it’s unsurprising when they regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, so that all that will be left is Facebook. Sad times we are living in.

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  • Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The thing is, those of us old enough to remember dialup aren’t anyone’s target demographic, and the cohort that is has been conditioned over time to believe that the current situation is the natural order of things. They were raised to consume, not seek.

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    • SteevyT@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Sometimes I miss being able to diagnose connection issues by ear.

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      • I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Bleep boop ding **GRONK GRONK GRONK ** crrrrnchhh

        You’ve got mail!

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