PrimalAnimist

I even paste -inurl:[reddit.com] to the end of my google searches so I don’t even accidentally click on a link from Reddit in my searches. lol

Probably right wing populists are the majority there now. Intelligent people abandoned the dumpster fire. Just like Twitter. It’s just a far-right cesspool of hate now.

Collections add a little something real to an interest. You are into baseball? Collect baseball cards and baseball memorabilia. Some find a tactile connection improves their enjoyment. For some people, it may be old video games, for others it may be coins, stamps, achievements in video games. Yes they are digital, but you can see them in your achievement/trophy list. I think some people are drawn to collections more than others because they favor a certain learning style over another. I’m not educated in behavior in any way so I am qualified to share my opinion on the Internet. There’s nothing abnormal about that. The collecting part. Not the part where I have no real knowledge on a topic but I feel my opinion is worthy of being heard. That’s actually normal, too, probably. But it shouldn’t be.

The only thing they could bring back that would make me consider making an account is TheButton. By the way I was a 42s Blue Hitchhiker.

It may just be the weed, but for a moment I thought I was reading something off a Night City public BBS.

You can’t tell anyone this, but I have a friend who is deep inside the insurance industry. Some of the big guys have invested heavy into LEDs. So to maximize the LED investments, they give manufacturers safety discounts for every LED they can attach to their shit. Big guys make some extra zeros for their accounts, and sharpie and 3M get some splash, too.

Money has no intrinsic value at all. The true wealth is labor. Labor has actual value. The masses own the wealth and we give it to others in exchange for “money”. The power of the rich only remains for as long as they can control the labor. This is why they spread so much fear about AI “taking your jobs”. Every time AI and automation take away a job, it takes away a little bit of power. Because capitalism has taught us, all things being equal, the service or product that costs less is what we buy. Products with an AI labor force don’t have to pay for that labor, and capitalistic competition will drive the prices down. As more and more labor is shifted to AI and automation, those who controlled human labor, the actual wealth, will lose control of that wealth.

If they are unable to stop it, the eventual progression would be replacing all human labor and do away with the need to even have a money system. This will do away with wage slaves, and allow us to focus on learning and having fun. But the billionaires would be no different than everyone else when that playing field is levelled. They hate that. They oppose it. They try and manipulate us to fear AI and to resist it. Capitalism is truly just another system of control.

I agree with that logic. But for me personally, I don’t feel “locked” into google. There are no contracts, no penalties for moving to some other service if I need. I never use customer support from any of these services because I find it’s easier to just look for the answers myself. I have no loyalty to any company, I simply use what best serves me at the time. All corps are interested in profit over people, so there’s really no company I have found to be fully ethical and transparent while offering a competing service that is as reliable.

I have the free 15 GB of cloud storage with them, but I don’t use it. I keep my data on my own cloud storage box. Yes, I have a gmail account, but I also have a proton.me account that I use more than gmail. Also, pretty much every big service out there is powered by Google and/or Amazon (see Twitter lol), so looking at the big picture, right now, we are dependent on Google in ways we are not even aware.

This is also why I am excited to see the shift to open source and self-hosting. I think a time is coming, too, where big companies are going to have to pay us for access to our data. I’ve made almost $200 just casually answering questions for the Google Rewards app. Sometimes it’s a dime, sometimes fifty cents, occasionally a question nets more. Those credits can be used to pay for any google services or purchases. I usually buy movies I can’t find on streaming services with my Google Rewards credits (my pirate days are long gone, it’s just not as convenient for me anymore and if I can’t watch it through a service or buy it, I just don’t need to watch it lol).

I really want to self-host a lemmy server sometime in the next year, I have a Core i5 desktop that’s not dead, just sits in a closet. My wish is to have all my personal social media self-hosted and I can choose who I want to federate with and who I don’t. But I’m not a pioneer. I’m waiting til this all settles a little to see if it’s worth the work.

Check out Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network here (US), and I get unlimited data, no rate limits. I have three phone numbers on my account and it costs me $85 a month total. Also the phones from the Fi store are super cheap if you stay on Google Fi. My pixel 7 got $300 off at purchase and $100 for my old phone. They are unlocked, too. Something I hate when buying from other providers. One of my phones had a Verizon sim and a Google Fi e-sim, so I can switch services with easy. Here in the mountains, service can be spotty in places with TMobile. Wifi calling is also available though, so that helps, too. I abandoned US Cellular entirely.

I still use Google news to follow some topics and it gathers articles from my local news sites, too. But any time if shows an article that prompts me to register to see it, I just go back to the Google news page and tell it to block that source.

You annoy me once and you disappear lol.

Being outraged against a system that exploits the labor of the masses for the profit of the few is not the same as being outraged at other people who disagree with you. You can support capitalism and I don’t need to insult you or make attacks against you personally. Outrage, when it is against something you feel to be harmful is normal. Outrage that is generated by corporate manipulation is not normal. For example, the hatred toward the trans community and drag queens has never been a “thing”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgkWQpgZ1JQ

This is a clip from a Love Boat episode. It aired in 1982. Nobody called them “woke” or even really talked about it the next day. Drag shows have been in US culture since at least the 1920s. I remember, back in the 90s, people would flock to this club in town called “Discovery” on Saturday nights. It was a gay dance club, but on Saturdays, there would often be an equal number of straight couples who came to enjoy the extravagant stage shows, which were similar to something you might see in Vegas. This was in the deep south, too. There were no protests. There were no attacks. There was no violence. There was no outrage.

We have been manipulated because it’s profitable. Oh and, yes, thank capitalism for that. :)

Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram…their default content (your frontpage, your personal feed, etc) show you the content their algorithms have determined will make you most engaged and remain there longer to 1. Generate more free content for them to sell, 2. command your attention so they can sell that attention to advertisers. Corporate “social” media is technically “social exploitation” and has effects that reach into the real world. The behaviors they feeds spill into our interactions in real life.

But Meta doesn’t own social media. They have some social media platforms that are finding direct, open-source alternatives to their service…for FREE. The days of uncontested, corporate-controlled, AI-manipulated social media have come to an end.

I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.

I feel like they all see the inevitability that AI will drastically change the money model very soon. And it will not be to their profit, so best make every penny they can right now is their mentality.

That’s really difficult to do with a karma-like system. People posting in echo-chambers can post misinformation but receive many up votes.

Credibility is subjective. For example, people on one side of a political ideology will not think people on the opposite side are credible. So who can really determine an “attribute of credibility”?

We would have to agree on a standard first and that’s just not going to happen.

Former redditor. What do I call myself now? Lemming? lol But I also noticed that I don’t see some Karma score equivalent, which is a great thing to leave behind. Those imaginary points were just useless at best, and used against people who were new at the worst.

Let’s be honest, this price change was all about being able to charge the big corps mega money for access to their data in order to train new generations of AI. The price is absurd, yes, but the owners of reddit know that Google and Microsoft have deep pockets (among other global corps wanting the massive amount of data reddit has saved).

They never expected the third party apps to be able to pay this much and frankly, they don’t care. It’s HUGE profit from AI corps, and the losses, at least short term, will be overshadowed by the gains. Long term? I don’t know, this isn’t my area of expertise, but, like I did with Twitter, I have moved on so at this point, it’s no longer relevant to me.