this is a good example of white saviorism, where affluent "do-gooders" want to do something "good" but in that action, they sort of just demean the people they're trying to help and reinforce the existing power structures. If they were to actually help kids around the world, they'd need to actually talk to different communities and talk to them, placing both groups on an equal level, something that its pretty antithetical to white supremacy.

I think this would be a really good idea, but I'm not sure if they could make enough money to support their whole business on just ad revenue. This might end up in social media companies resorting to an even more unethical way of making money, and even if they make enough from just ads, theres no guarantee that they won't want to make more money and go to other business models as a result.

I'm a lot more cognizant of different functions and how sites use them to make you spend more time on their apps. I consider the financial motives of what content gets promoted to me a lot more.

I would like social media sites to operate more as something like a local park, where profit isn't the sole motive. It would be cool if the people running it weren't focused solely on profit, and instead social media could purely be a place to share interests and conversations with people all over the world.

Yes. I think when someone causes irreparable harm, such as the Nazis, theres no type of apology that could possibly reconcile the damage done. Also, reconciliation sort of implies that the victims have to forgive as well, and it's not the responsibility of people who are harmed to forgive people who've done awful things to them.

This reminds me of a situation on twitter I saw about a year ago. Bascically a woman decided to cook a pot of homeade chili for her neighboors because she noticed they were mostly ordering pizza and thought they might like a homecooked meal. Then people got really upset for various reasons, like saying she was degrading herself as a woman. Then people who thought this was a dumb thing to get upset about started talking about how stupid it was to get mad at someone for making soup, and it just went really viral.

I think it's always morally correct to expose Nazis, racists, and misogynists. If they want to flaunt their beliefs and make marginalized communities feel unsafe, it's only fair that people know they're an unsafe person, and that person can deal with the repercussions of demonstrating their hateful beliefs.

also, just having freedom of speech dosen't mean freedom from consequences. if you say racist, derogatory, or cruel things, you will likely face the consequences of saying them, such as losing your job or confrontation by others. this dosen't mean you're being censored, it just means you said something bad and now have to deal with it.

a few years ago, there was a trump rally somewhere that had free tickets, and so there was this movement on tiktok to book a bunch of tickets and then not show up. I booked a reservation under the name Mike Litoris and apparently thousands of other people did the same, so only a few hundred people were actually at the rally. I guess this could be more like trolling, but it was people coming together for a specific purpose

I guess it would be cool to have those pictures, but personally the discomfort and breach of privacy they must have experienced would likely have outweighed the benifit of getting those pictures. That seems very violating and scary to know that you can be identified anywhere, even when you're not expecting to be.

Wikepedia's moderation systems are absolutely phenomenal, I think. One of my teachers in highschool tried to edit a page with some wrong information to prove that Wikipedia wasn't always reliable, and then we we went to access the page like 20 minutes later, the misinformation was gone and my teacher had gotten a warning on her account. While someone definitely could have read the article in that 20-minute window, the speed at which it was fixed is really impressive to me.

I feel like this kind of shows that 4chan and 8chan don't particularly care about upholding the "anything goes" attitude and instead care more about how keeping users on the platform. They allow hate speech and harassment because it's sort of one of their main selling points, but the second something slows down usage and stops them from getting hits, they ban it because its ultimately impractical to allow people to say and do literally whatever they want online.

This is such an issue, and it's so ingrained into us today. I used to journal a lot, and I used to get stressed when i would journal because I was worried that whatever imaginary person was reading this after me would think I was lame or confusing or something. I realized that I couldn't experience myself without processing it through the lens of an imaginary onlooker, and that's really been screwing with me recently.

I've also seen a lot of harm caused to teenage boys, whether it's somthing like the alt-right pipeline or unhealthy workout culture. Lots of guys I know are getting really into fitness, which is a good thing, until they start showing me who their "body goals" are, which are famous bodybuildiers who either definitely take steroids, or do literally northing but workout all the time.

I totally remember some of these online versions as well, like "repost this image or the girl from the ring will be in your room tonight" or the one that's like "we're trying to make the longest text chain ever, add your name and send to 5 other people!" I still don't really understand the point of them, because they were just pretty annoying and except for the actual posts, the people who originated them probably didn't get anything out of it.

That's so interesting! I had no idea about the origins of the term meme, and I didn't really know the true definition either. It defintely makes sense though, memes can define culture and be incredibly influential.

I actually just recently discovered a new friend's TikTok account from freshman year of highschool that they forgot to delete. It wasn't a huge deal and we thought it was actually pretty funny (plus they were really successful, they had like 10k followers), I definitely would not want my cringey freshman TikToks to be discovered by someone I just met.

This is in part what made me lead to deleting twitter. Not really because I troll accounts regularly, but news accounts would post things about all the awful things happening in the world and I would feel obligated to share that information, so instead of a place where I'd go to see cute cats and wind down for the day, it quickly became a doomscrolling sinkhole.

this sort of reminds me of how my friend's mom uses her phone. She's visually impaired, but phones are very visual objects, so instead of tapping on app icons to open them, she has to tap on one to hear it's name, and then tap twice to actually open it. She prefers to use text-to-speech, because typing on a phone keyboard is much slower when you have to listen for each letter you type and can't get tactile cues like on a computer keyboard.

it's not considered a disablity, because our world isn't built with the expectation that everyone can fly. If everyone could fly, and you were an otherwise healthy person but with no wings, you'd then have a disability because it would be harder to access certain places that most people would have no trouble reaching. You'd need accommodations, like ladders or ropes.

I think this is a problem for a lot of different things, because while you can usually find a list of a platform's rules, a lot of people never read the privacy policy. It's too long and confusing and filled with too much jargon to expect everyone to read, and yet if everyone was able to read it they may have more doubts about the security of their info online.

One one hand, it's really easy to have one go-to password for all sorts of things, but on the other, it's dangerous to use the same for everything. I usually use different passwords for different things, but it can be really annoying to have to constantly reset passwords when i forget them or don't remeber which one I used for what thing.

I have my personalized ads turned off, and I have for a few years now. I can't see my ad profile because it supposedly doesn't exist, but that doesn't stop me from getting fairly targeted ads like anti-vaping commercials, which seem to be targeted to teenagers and young people.

its a big issue of correlation, not causation. just because some things may be related (like COVID and candle sales spiking in the fall), it dosen't mean that they are directly related to each other or that one is responsible for the other.

I think this sentiment is still pretty prevalent in online gaming today. Even though there are some successful women who've made a platform off gaming, they've done so by creating very sexualized versions of themselves, such as Belle Delphine. For women in streaming or online in general, they have two options: be fetishized, or be harassed. Obviously this isn't everywhere, but if you're on voice chat while playing COD and sounding like a woman, chances are very likely that you'll get harassed in some way by people who feel protected by their anonymous usernames and avatars.

I think this tactic is part of the reason why there has been such a rise in "cancel culture" by conservatives. They start arguing about things like Critical Race Theory or trans people using bathrooms, and this requires people to start trying to come up with legitimate defenses for letting people use the bathroom, instead of simply pointing out that its sort of a dumb thing to be worried about. Plus, it also benefits the people in power by distracting the general population from other issues that they are more responsible for, like the high cost of living, or the low minimum wage.

I didn't know there was a name for this! I've definitely felt it multiple times, like being out on a date and running into my parents. I thought it was just an awkward situation.

this is interesting because it's all about context. videos of people reading creepypastas or movies about fictional teenagers going through fictional events are usually enjoyed, but because it wasn't in a situation where people usually expected things to be fake, people got upset.

these unfiltered forums remind me a lot of the stanford prison experiments, where when people hide behind false identities or perceived positions of power (such as a guard uniform or anonymous username), they are more likely to do awful things. the fear of getting caught is little to none, because everyone is doing it, which makes it a social norm in the space. so in spaces like 4Chan and stuff, hateful rhetoric spirals out of control pretty fast, to the point where the original "anything goes" rules don't cut it anymore, and they need a different platform to spiral deeper.

some people really like the idea of myspace, maybe because it seems simpler, or nostalgic, i don't know. but theres a new website that's attempting to re-create the vibe on myspace called spacehey, and i have a few friends who have tried it out. its just interesting that it's having a little revival.

I never really thought of sound being saved as numbers. It makes a lot of sense given how computers work, but to think that I'm basically listening to a series of numbers every time I listen to music is super interesting.

plus, there isn't really any way for them to represent the likes/retweets/replies as non-whole numbers or complex numbers, because no one can half-like a post. it either gets a like or it dosen't.

this can ben super helpful, as well as block coding which is used on websites like scratch. basically, it has all of the commands sort of written, but it's the user's job to figure out the order and how to configure it to make a cohesive animation or a game or something.

not all negative bots are meant to bombard with tweets, there was a bot where when people mentioned the name of a movie, it would automatically respond with a spoiler. That's just one tweet but it's still in the category of maybe not super harmful but generally mean

I think this is a very healthy framework to view things through, and one that makes more sense to encourage others to follow. It dosen't really force anyone one way or the other, and it allows people outlets without falling into unhealthy lifestyles or puritannical repression.

I think it's absolutely their responsibility. They're deciding to bring some new kind of tech into the world, so they need to think through that decision and figure out if its truly a good idea. I know that profit is a big motivator, but thinking about possible consequences and if its worth the money is something that every tech developer should consider.