I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that calls for generic revolt are likely to get us anywhere. It's gotta be targeted and meaningful and executed with a measure of a restraint. It needs to be clear we can be reasoned with.
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.
Dump advertising into the ocean. The motivation for maximizing engagement on social media is to maximize ad impressions for revenue. Every algorithm, every dark pattern, every UX tweak, is aimed toward that sole end. The issue cannot be fixed by regulating social media itself; it is the enormous monetary incentive that is the root of the problem and until the flow of money is choked off, corporations will still doggedly pursue that revenue.
So what exactly are you proposing - that we encourage all users to only pay for ad-free versions of every service they use, instead of choosing an ad-supported version? Try to outlaw adverting globally? What is an ad - a sign for a company? A company’s circular? A sign for company with a logo next to it? (To understand what should be forbidden.)
> every algorithm … every UX tweak
Actually, is the whole comment sarcasm? Or is the proposal to ban algorithms/UX changes? Or just such things if they increase sales on a product page, etc?
Hmm, how about taxing ad impressions per user, per social media site, per day on an increasing scale? It remains possible for a social media site to remain profitable but makes it rapidly unprofitable to show too many ads. It also incentivizes the social media site to push the user toward paid service with no ads that can be more profitable than the maximum number of ads they are allowed to spew at free users.
A good start would be to make it a criminal offence to sell the right to execute code on somebody's device without their consent. And to tax into oblivion any service that can't function without such consent.
We can work our way up to eliminating all targeted advertising later, lets start with the stuff that's indistinguishable from malware.
If someone explicitly chose an ad-supported option (instead of paying for an ad-free version, likely with an accompanying ToS), would that count as consent?
Would a GDPR-type banner also count? Although I guess GDPR banners generally need JS to execute, so that wouldn't be allowed - I guess a GDPR-like interstitial page would be needed before accessing most websites? Or what would consent mean?
> the right to execute code on somebody’s device
1. Would that include serving text, image, and/or video JavaScript ads?
2. Would this mean that JavaScript or anything beyond text/images/videos would generally be forbidden on the web, without 'consent' (also depends on the question above about what counts as consent)?
Regardless, if we did do away with most ads, do you imagine that much of today’s internet/websites (which are ad-supported) would go away? Become paywalled? Something else?
I don't think history is on your side there. Disengagement might be a small first step, but for no rebellion worth mentioning was disengagement in any way ultimate.
Rebellion is about stripping people of power. The disengagement you're describing, if not followed up by a different sort of reengagement, would merely be getting out of the power's way.
I'd love to lobby for "the right" to opt out of AI features.
When I google search "why is the sky blue" , it spins up an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful for simple, known answers.
When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again. Google was a pioneer of search indexing, and now it seems like we don't attempt to index answers at all. They're spinning up an LLM every time because they're trying to run up the AI "adoption" metrics.
I'd love to be able to ask for simple things, like the address of the local restaurant 3 blocks away, without firing up a GPU in an AI data center.
I don't always want to "talk with" a computer. Sometimes I just want to "use" a computer. Maybe that makes me a fool. Or an old man yelling at clouds.
> When my friend googles the same thing, it spins up the LLM again
I just tried this from two different devices, neither logged in, both on separate IPs from different states.
Got the exact same answer.
These are almost certainly cached. It would be naive to think Google is performing the same LLM requests over and over again for the same terms for no reason.
> 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.
If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
<< Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
Interesting point, because Hacker News doesn't serve ads, and doesn't have any personalized algorithms, yet it's quite compelling and I waste a lot of time here.
Is the problem really social media though? Without some kind of long-distance-capable social medium that we participate in directly, how are we going to know when the news is lying to us? Social media's alternatives also can't resist corruption, if we give up this fight, we'll lose that one too.
I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
Capital P proof is great if you want to know whether a topological space is separable, but if you want to know if you should stop paying your taxes because maybe they're causing more harm than good then you're going to have to rely on something besides capital P proof. You're going to have to rely on induction and probability. More vs less data matters quite a bit in such places.
Sources can include people you've never met, have no reason to lie, and happened to be in an opportune position to contribute to the sort of lowercase p proofs that you need.
If we can fix social media there can be many such people. If not, there will be necessarily fewer, and they'll have to be replaced by people for whom addressing the public with new information is their job. The latter sort are high value targets for corruption. As long as they're worried about keeping that job, they have to also worry about who they upset with their information. You're necessarily going to get weaker lowercase-p proofs from such people.
That's not to say that we'll have no tools for keeping power in check, but we will have fewer, which means their abuses will be more frequent and more severe.
I have given an example of something that I can prove, and you have failed to "easily" disprove it. Disappointing given the cockiness of your challenge.
And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
The challenge was not that you prove it to yourself, Mr. Descartes. It was that you prove it to bdangpublic. It doesn't look like you've done so to me.
You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
That's moving the goalpost. The challenge was not to prove it to them, but to give an example of a provable thing, them claiming they would be easily able to prove the negative(or to prove that I cannot prove it? The wording is ambigous).
Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun.
But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
So what kind of revolt are you calling for? Are we dumping GPU's into the ocean like we did with tea in Boston that one time? Are we disconnecting datacenters from the internet? Are we all gonna change our profile picture? Specifics please.