I feel like this is very much linked to the bystander effect. When one is an individual in an incredibly large crowd, it is easy to think yourself that someone else will do it. As as result, only those who have great personal motivation/passion end up acting and contributing to crowdsourced projects.

I think Amazon Mechanical Turk sands out as an example of crowdsourcing gone wrong. IDK if "wrong" is the best way to put it since it's working as intended. Because everyone has access to these jobs, who ever charges the least gets the roll. As a result, the pay of these jobs are usually extremely poor and the quality of work varies greatly. Many of the workers using Mechanical Turk are concentrated in poorer nations. The entire system is pretty exploitive.

Like any other job, they should get benefits like medical and therapy, to cover the risks that they incur. Additionally, in the same way it is illegal to put workers in unsafe working conditions, social media companies should leverage bots and automated systems to reduce the risk of truama.

I have very mixed thought on the ability for creators to delete certain comments. While it is nice to give creators more control over how their content is interacted with it also has potential to be abused. I think holding all comments for review on the other hand is a pretty impractical idea, considering how many comments larger youtubers get.

While the monitoring of mental health can definitely save lives and prevent people from hurting themselves and others, it can also be considered a breach of privacy, since many would consider their mental state a very personal matter. In certain extreme cases, mental health can also be used to justify shadow banning/directly banning users, or intervention by law enforcement, for better or worse.

I strongly agree with this. There is so much bad press, infamous cases, and issues caused involving social media, that people often forget the good that can come from social media sites. Social media sites not only allow us to bond with those we normally can't. They also allow us to stay informed and can often be vital to spreading and sustaining important social movements.

I think it's very common to go viral for all the wrong reasons, like a comment gaining notoriety for being highly contentious or a book/video game going viral for being "bad." While this can be very stressful and humiliating for some people, there are also some people who're willing to go viral at all costs, often unpurposely posts offensive/inflamatory content to that end.

I don't know why but this reminds me of a lot of old computer viruses like mydoom and the love bug worm, which either utilized or imitated chain emails. These emails would either convince the user to send it to another, or when they became more sophisticated, automatically send themselves in a way which looks benign.

Watched this video a long time ago. I think it's interesting how conspiracy theorists who believe in one theory gravitate toward all other theories. Dan Olson explains it as "They aren't flat earthers because they believe the Earth is flat, they are flat earthers because if that were true, it would validate all their other beliefs." A lot of these theories are more about mistrust of the government and some secret group(often responsible for their frustration with the world), than what the theory actually claims.

I think cases like this are a good example of the potential pitfalls of recommendation algorithms. Algorithms that only optimize for viewer retention tends to have side effects such as recommending offensive and toxic content, creating echo chambers, discouraging creativity, and failing to account for content which defy usual classification. Most companies try to mitigate these issues to some extent, both for better user experiences and a the long term health of the social media site.

I've basically gone my entire life not realizing that I had autism until an autistic friend pointed it out to me. Over my life, I've come up with strategies to control my behavior in social situations. On one hand, I don't think of myself as disabled. But on the other hand, knowing that I was autistic did make feel like a huge weight has been taken off. So many of the things I struggled with in middle school now make so much more sense.

There is definitely a stigma around the word disability, due to how people with disabilities are treated. Many people think of disabilities, not as a result of society not being designed for a person's needs, but as that person being inept in some way. As a result, many shy away from the label. It also doesn't help that many mental disabilities are also used as insults.