This is just an argument for ceding space to conservatives, which makes them seem more prevalent than they are, because they’ve driven the opposition away.

The irony of a Beehaw user trying to making this argument in a Beehaw thread…

Whether social media is essential to life or not, it’s a normal part of modern life, and telling people to avoid it is no different than telling people to avoid bars or clubs if they don’t want to be harassed. It’s just victim blaming.

The correct comparison would be that it is like returning to the same bar, on the same day, at the same time when you know the people who have harassed you previously will be there. It is not victim blaming to suggest avoiding that particular bar if attending it is causing the person to have a mental breakdown. Giving choice, power and control back to the victim is not the same as blaming them for their situation. Again, we are having this conversation in a Beehaw thread; if you don’t understand the significance of that then I don’t know what else to say.

I would encourage you to read OP’s post again and ask yourself why the only top level reply in the thread might seem to be addressing an idea rather than a person.

Have you tried the various Firefox forks? If one of your primary problems with Firefox is a belief that they are “evil like Google” then switching to a browser developed by Google and further entrenching their monopoly on the market is a very strange decision.

Is it actually viable for ordinary people to purchase small amounts of cryptocurrency for the sole purposes of making more private purchases online or taking advantage of cryptocurrency discounts? All the coverage on them is about large-scale investing which makes me feel like no one buying and selling actually has any interest in cryptocurrencies as an alternative currency. Instead it’s just about getting rich, which is a massive turn off.

And now, you’re changing the subject.

I don’t know why you keep saying this. Do you still think I’m someone else you replied to earlier?

They weren’t “going off on a rant”, though. They were responding to something you said and it was a pretty good reply too with a lot of detail and thought put into it. If you didn’t want to discuss the election, you shouldn’t have quoted a sentence about the election. Getting all snide and dismissive after the fact is very strange behaviour on your part.

Do you even read the usernames of the people you reply to?

I see a lot of people reacting negatively to minorities and leftists breaking down on social media

The thing about that though is right wingers will push and push and push. They will spend all day every day harassing someone until they finally break down and have an outburst.

If you don’t spend all day on social media, you can’t be harassed on social media all day. If an online space is so toxic that you are “breaking down” then you have a responsibility to yourself to reassess whether it is actually healthy for you to be spending time in that space. Don’t get hung up on some kindergarten ideas about “fairness” or “they started it”, take a step back and realise that you actually have agency and choice. It is very strange to me that people complain about how toxic social media is and then change absolutely nothing about their own behaviour. Social media is non-essential to life, you do not need to be using it. Particularly not if it is causing you severe mental stress.

Why are you going off on some rant about how to win the election? What you’re saying is correct about how to approach the election and that’s not the subject of this post or this conversation.

You directly quoted and replied to a sentence referencing Trump’s presidential campaign. It is perfectly reasonable for people to assume you are interested in discussing the upcoming presidential election.

I have that problem too but I find using a Chromium-based browser is the solution. I doubt you actually need to use Chrome for these websites you’re having problems with.

Yes, Trump’s campaign is contributing to the effectiveness of the “weird” attack by very obviously allowing themselves to be triggered by it. Running counter-ads where they try to co-opt “weird” and use it to describe the Democrats is a massive fail on their part.

That was a good read, thanks for sharing. I agree with his caution. Probably the most important line there is the one people seem to most often forget:

Online subcommunities vastly overrate how representative their views are of the larger electorate

You could also say online sub-communities often vastly underestimate how important the views of a minority of the electorate are. It doesn’t matter if a majority of your peers in the US, or even the world, think Trump is unelectable or that Harris will win in a landslide. The young left in the US sometimes loses sight of that because their social media bubble constantly reinforces a positive news cycle about their candidate and a negative news cycle about their opponent.

I recently reset a laptop with Windows 11 on it, prior to installing Linux, and went through the setup process again. It is so bad now, the offline account option was completely missing and it was constantly trying to push Microsoft services on me. It felt very reminiscent of how freeware installations often try to trick users into accepting additional third party garbage.

The real problem for Trump is that Vance is an entirely new weak spot. Everyone knows Trump at this point, he is actually quite difficult to attack because most people already have a pretty locked in opinion about him. It’s very difficult to change votes with a campaign focusrd solely on Trump. Vance is a lot more unknown and thus Democrats actually have a really good chance to shape how the public sees him. It helps massively that Vance is a genuinely unusual character. If the election ends up being as tight as is currently predicted, a bad VP pick could be very costly for Trump.

Vance has proved an absolutely terrible pick for Trump so far. It’s completely derailed his campaign and given the Democrats multiple new non-doomsday attack lines which they desperately needed. If Harris actually manages to win the presidency against all odds, people will look back to the Vance selection as the moment when Trump and MAGA started celebrating before they’d crossed the finish line.

Fear doesn’t always inspire action, it can often inhibit it. I’m glad the Harris campaign has finally acknowledged this, even if many supporters continue to peddle doomsday myths that actively hurt their cause.

It doesn’t matter whether your feed is “tamed”, though. This is a massive issue that extends well beyond the happy fantasy land you’ve created filled with rainbows and ponies. Even those who don’t use mainstream social media at all are affected when it influences the real world.

You can also look at the Patriot Act as another example of the US Government proving it is completely untrustworthy when it comes to the privacy of its citizens.

Amusingly, if you check conservative media sources and communities you’ll find they are claiming exactly the same thing about Harris.

“This was Microsoft’s choice, not ours,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told me in an email. “We are and have been open to agreements with companies who are open about their intentions and commit to treat us and our users fairly. If Bing or others want access within our policies, without training, without summarization, and without selling it to others, we are and have always been open to that. If they want to build a business selling Reddit data or using the data for training, we could be open to that, but it’s a commercial conversation.”

Mojeek, the search engine that initially told me that Reddit was blocking all search engines but Google, and which was unable to get in touch with Reddit at the time, told me Reddit got in touch after that story was published. Mojeek said it was unable to share any details about the deal because of an NDA, but confirmed that Reddit wanted to get paid for letting Mojeek crawl the site, even though Mojeek does not have any AI products.

This doesn’t add up and it makes me wonder what else Google and reddit agreed upon. This situation benefits no one except Google, as far as I can tell. If reddit wants to milk search engines, and Microsoft is willing and able to pay (which I assume they are), there is no reason for the deal to not go ahead like it did with Google. Kinda makes my brain start going down the conspiracy path, but then again it’s hardly unbelievable that Google would pursue anti-competitive business strategies, particularly when it comes to generative AI.