Apple is doing to creators what the recording industry did to musicians. Enjoy what's left of the Golden Age of Patreon content because greed is going to suffocate it out of existence.
Not a day goes by that I regret blocking MS from upgrading my personal PC from Win 10 to Win 11. I decided going without ongoing support is a small price to pay for the joy of not stepping into a bottomless pit of wtf every time I log on and work on stuff.
Late to the thread but I recommend volunteering. The best medicine for loneliness is to serve others in greater need. Churches, hospitals, libraries, all not-for-profit institutions.
Part of loneliness is feeling like you won't be missed. When you serve others (even indirectly if direct contact is not your thing), you feel needed and have purpose.
Volunteering is a great way to get out of a slump. Service of any kind is really great at gaining new perspective and finding value in life. It helped me realign my life years ago, too.
But I ended up taking it too far. Boundaries start to get blurry, my value started to get wrapped up in my service, to the point it became “well if I stop serving I’ll be worthless”. Which is a tough feeling to face, especially when a subset of the people you end up serving, while appreciative, really end up not caring that much about you as a person. They’re not in a place to give you emotional support, usually.
All that to say, balance is the spice of life. Service is great. Just be sure to balance it out with another source of replenishment.
But the other part of loneliness is feeling like (or knowing that) nobody cares what you think or feel or have to say.
I've been (accidentally) helping people with my surveys for a few months now. It brings a sense of joy when someone comes up to me and tells me that my presence has helped them or that they look forward to my surveys. But it also increases the loneliness that I feel, because none of them care about me or what I think or how I feel. None of them have ever asked.
Well, except for a couple friends I've made, who clearly do care now, and have shown it in a few ways, but we just haven't had an opportunity yet to have coffee or some other interaction where they can show more directly that they care about me, by asking me about how I feel, etc. But those are the exception.
I suppose, that's what I'm after. Not just personally for myself, but what I'm trying to help solve for other people: to help them get to a point where others actually do care about them, and they have opportunities to show it, such as asking how their day was over coffee. For countless people who are just like me, I think this is all they need to not feel lonely anymore. So that's my goal.
And I don't think volunteering is the answer, but I think it can be a start for some of them, a way to meet people. But just as good a way to meet people as saying hi to the person at the next self checkout kisk or the bus stop. The problem for most people is that they don't say hi. Maybe they're convinced, like I am, that nobody would ever want them to, that they would only be a burdensome bother to others, and therefore should always stay silent.
I suppose this is what I'm trying to solve. How to convince others that this isn't true, as one person standing outside holding a sign.
A while ago, I moved everything on my iPhone home screen to screen 2 (and everything on screen 2 to screen 3, etc.) and emptied the quick access bar at the bottom (no phone app, msg app - just an empty box). There are zero icons (literally nothing) on my home screen except the wallpaper. One of the best things I've ever done on my iPhone.
I felt like as soon as I opened my phone, everything on the home screen was clamoring for my attention: new text messages, new emails, new calls, new reminders, alerts, alerts alerts.
Now, when I open my phone, I get a peaceful empty screen. If I scroll right, I can see the ocean of alerts (if that's what I'm ready to tackle) or I can swipe left to a screen with a few shortcuts for phone or browser (Orion).
In short, I put the chaos in a box that I only open when I want to. Might sound trite but it's made a big difference. I also turned off the thing that opens the phone as soon as I pick it up. Now, half the time I pick it up, I look at, decide I can live without all the chaos and put it back in my pocket.
I guess my orig post triggered because with a blank home screen, I can't accidentally activate the phone camera.
An alternate strategy is to turn off most of those alerts. When I open my home screen I see a bunch of icons, but only two of them are allowed to show the little red circle with a number in it: Phone and Messages. I picked those since I am habitually up to date on them. So the number is usually quite low, usually below 5.
I also do not allow most apps to put banners on the screen (locked or unlocked), or beep, or buzz the phone. Almost all my apps have notifications turned off completely. If I want to know the status of my email, I open the email app. If I want to see what's new in Instagram, I open Instagram. Etc.
But the point is, those checks happen on my schedule, not when I'm prompted.
So lemme guess - in order to prove one's age, one needs to obtain a digital ID and use said ID to gain access to the internet thereby creating a perfect system to monitor one's internet activity.
Gotta hand it to them - "protecting the children" is a pretty good pretext.
Interesting to see these kinds of comments more in this thread compared to the one from yesterday.
The one from yesterday was discussing how australia is banning social media for anyone under 16. Most comments were supportive because they hate social media.
A few comments were discussing how it is just a way to propagate more KYC.
It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely than banning it for under-sixteens. Paradoxically it infringes on freedom less, as it bans a type of business model for being too harmful rather than restricting people's rights to view and share information.
The very people with the most to gain from silencing dissidents or suppressing certain viewpoints given the power to restrict access to selected social media platforms while encouraging the use of others.
None of this recent crackdown on social media is really about 'protecting the kids', is it?
I would personally simply heavily tax ad revenue rather than banning social media, as while a blanket ban is ironically less of an infringement on free speech than banning it for children, it’s still something of an infringement.
There’s a bunch of benefits to an ad-tax too, beyond revenue generation: Users won’t be encouraged to use VPNs (and most VPN users probably also use ad blockers anyway). It’s difficult to evade, since an advertising business kind-of has to operate in the open; if nobody knows you’re running an ad business, your ad business has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do. Advertisers are also purely profit-motivated, and so won’t hesitate to rat out their competitors if they’re using some loophole to gain a competitive advantage. It’s also very difficult for them to hide which country they’re targeting, since that information has to be available to their customers, so the taxmen can get it by subpoenaing customers or posing as them. And there’s not that many big ad-tech companies, so you don’t really mind if a few small-fries slip through the net.
The problem with just taxing them more is that they'll make the algorithms doing all the personal and societal damage even more agressive to compensate.
> It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely
Whenever I read these comments on Hacker News, on user-generated stories which are ranked in my algorithmic front page feed, written by other users posting comments and socializing, I wonder if the comments realizes that HN is also a social media website with millions of global users.
Or if they just get angry and yell “No that’s not what I meant” because they thought the government social media regulations would only target the sites they don’t like, not the sites they do.
The contention is that the thing in question is harmful for minors and adults, albeit perhaps to different degrees. Also, to be clear, any ban should be enforced on the offering side, not the consumption side.
You can easily argue that most of the things that are banned for minors but not for adults are also harmful or at least dangerous for adults as well. Alcohol, pot, tobacco, pornography, stripping or acting in pornography, gun purchases, etc. are all debatable as far as adults, but clearly should be out of the question for developing brains. Perhaps an even better parallel to social media is that minors cannot get credit cards or take out loans without parental approval. A social media profile is a bit like taking out a mortgage on the rest of your life.
There are things that can have lifelong harmful consequences that we as a society recognize adults have rights to, and which they may be capable of moderating their exposure to, but which minors are simply not prepared to fully understand the consequences of.
Banning minors from social media does not ban their speech or access to speech. It bans their access to the gamified drug-like patterns of engagement surrounding the commoditication of speech for the gain of companies which know full well that the services they provide are built on hooking someone's eyeballs at the earliest age possible.
As an Australian it's so irritating how enthusiastic people are to give up their privacy and freedom of speech, and also force everyone to hand over personal information to private companies, on the flimsiest of pretexts from our perpetually technologically incompetent government.
After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible.
Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong?
And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on...
It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.
What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.
4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.
Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.
> Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok?
As I mentioned in yesterday's thread, an online API still allows the government to track and monitor residents, which is arguably worse. You no longer have plausible deniability when the government asks you to hand over your social media credentials because they now know that you have, or at least attempted to open, an account with that provider.
The better solution would be an offline, cryptographic "wallet" (similar to the EU Digital Identity Wallet) that only exposes the age information and nothing else, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
I think the separation is in how 'algorithmic engagement' in social media is at least as dangerous as stuff that even the US still has banned in other forms of media [0].
Especially because it's gotten so bad. At first it was just 'making things popular in your network more visible'. But now it's to where when I use something like Facebook there is more 'algorithm spam' than anything actually happening with my friends. It's become something where the primary purpose is 'driving views' rather than communicating. [1]
A VPN is a bit different; it's a tool, and I will note one that depending on the specific definition has legitimate (or at least morally/ethically legitimate) uses.
[0] - e.x. unless it has been reversed in the last decade or two, in the US you still can't cut from a kid's cartoon right into a commercial for a toy/game related to said cartoon. I mean FFS that was a rule that got put in before 'attention hacking' was even a term.
[1] - TBH I'd love if we could get back to Myspace or maybe even early Facebook type social media. There's a lot of excitement lost when an algorithm feeds you shit versus a friend sharing it, and it was a lot less noise...
My point is more so that these are both approaches to push more KYC.
And many comments in here understand that this particular ban is using "for the kids" as an excuse, so why didn't the other thread have more comments recognizing this excuse?
There is a difference between a concept (banning social media for kids) and the actual implementation (requiring ID to visit sites or whatever they are going to do).
There is a theoretical difference, but in practice they are the same thing, and we all know it [1]:
> Social media platforms have admitted verifying user ages would likely involve surrendering personal IDs, as the Albanese government forges ahead with its under-16 ban.
The syntax kind of does mimic the rhythm of AI generated text but the ideas and flow appear original to me. I thought it was a good article and appreciate the points you make which I would not have otherwise known about.
I also think it bears pointing out that you chose not to refer readers to your podcast which is the exact opposite of what an AI bot would have done.
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