I know you’re joking, but it made me think.

On platforms like Twitter I never felt seen. I felt like I was talking to myself for the 30 seconds I actually engaged with it (I never could stand the format or the interface really).

On Lemmy I do feel seen, because it’s so much smaller. I know people read what I write and I get way more feedback here than I’ve ever gotten since (maybe) 2010-era Reddit.

But important? Anyone who can use the Internet to make themselves feel important must have been a sociopath to begin with because as near as I can tell the Internet is a misery machine designed to make you feel like a dumbshit.

Come to think of it, that’s probably why I hate the entire concept of “influencers” and the human toilets who call themselves that.

And yet not a single word in that entire article about bots being used to post on Internet forums to engineer public opinion, which is certainly what came to my mind when I read the headline.

The closest it comes is the section where it admits that because they’re all spoofing known Big Tech scrapers, they can’t actually say how much of any particular activity is actually going on beyond some broad generalizations.

I can confirm though - my web server was positively getting hammered until I locked it down with fail2ban.

taps_head.jpg can’t scan my camera roll if I don’t have one.

This is their wet dream, but I’ll never participate.

Edit: I don’t participate now. I pay for no subscriptions, no streaming services, and I use no cloud services. Oh, and I’m now completely Microsoft-free since October last year.

Which won’t matter at all once they start losing market share to Microsoft’s stupid decisions. The world will not sit on its thumbs because of Fortnight players. And good riddance in any case.

Windows? Facebook?

lol

I’ve never once posted on the Internet using a real name. I’ve never been a member of any social anything other than Reddit and Lemmy. I only even found Reddit because an IRC link aggregator I used to browse for news/memes went tits up.

I’m without question one of the 90% and I never thought they were going to require it for everyone. But I don’t like the idea that an algorithm is constantly writing a dossier about me to determine my “age” because I wasn’t fucking born yesterday.

Open source your shit and make it auditable or I’m not fucking using it anymore.

(you can donate to their defense fund)

I’m pretty certain we’re not going to spend our way out of this. If the answer is not to seize the means of production, then we’re gonna have to at least seize the means of oppression. Everything billionaires own in any country that means to be free should be seized.

This won’t happen, of course, until they wreak a lot more havoc, unfortunately the havoc they are wreaking is not laying the groundwork for the countries that host them to be more free.

I’m not the OP, but I have this one in my living room… 50", $232.

Well I suspect the quality is not going to be up to your standard, but this is the one I have in my living room, and I think it’s perfectly fine. But if you just can’t live without 120hz or whatever, then I guess you’re stuck.

Walmart used to have a variety of these, now they’re down to one. All my TVs are either 10+ years old or Sceptre and therefore are all dumb. But I don’t have a purist bone in my body when it comes to AV stuff.

Epic and GOG work on Heroic just fine and I’ve run two standalone games (Elite Dangerous and ESO) using Lutris with no problems.

All you have to do to see it is find a piece of current but generally ill-regarded media and post something negative about it. Then just sit back and watch all the totally real users flooding in to defend it and talk about how people who shit on it are only doing so for weak personal reasons, and it’s not that bad they’ve always kinda liked it etc.

Or just go to any halfway popular sub that talks about a food item that comes in a wide variety of flavors and brands. It’s a constant parade of pictures of brands with titles like “Who has tried this stuff and loves it?” or even “I can’t stand this stuff,” with an army of totally grass-roots posters defending it as “not for everybody but I love it” - and so on and so on.

It’s so obnoxious I can barely stand it anymore. Product subs and media subs are just worthless. I still get some traction out of niche gaming and hardware subs but that’s about it.

It ought to be framed as “we want them to leave. The whole purpose of the tax is to get them to leave.” The state would be better off without them. They are net negatives. They use massive amounts of resources and give nothing back. Pile all of them on Texas and see how that goes.

For real, all my TVs are Sceptre. They are not easy to find, but they are incredibly reasonably priced and completely dumb perfection.

If people like us make them popular enough, maybe they’ll realize this is a lucrative niche market.

Pff, I don’t trust Apple to be able to get Siri to do shit.

I was in the middle of making a reply like this but yours is better. Closed as duplicate.

Welcome to the era of media that cannot die.

Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.

Yeah, I’m not going to switch to a Manifest V3 browser because Firefox puts in access to an optional AI agent. If Firefox makes it so you can’t turn it off, which I wouldn’t think is likely, I might switch to something like Librewolf, but Chromium? No.

This is precisely the concept of Asimov’s short story All the Troubles of the World.