I’m sick of the Luddite slander. They were completely right and people need to know

A big issue that I don’t see being discussed a lot is that randomized polling has become more difficult as less people are willing to pick up their phone for unknown numbers nowadays.

Most polling is now opt-in, meaning that the data will be biased towards the groups who want to express their opinions the most (this tends to be the far right). Not saying the polling is wrong but perhaps not entirely accurate

that’s fair. I fully believe they could pull some fuckery that would make everything worse

honest question: why does it matter? all data in any fediverse project is public anyways

Why would they buy a company that is using a workaround when they could just make an iMessage app for android

I’ve been using Kagi lately and one of my favourite features is the ability to raise or lower the priority of a website in your searches. You can even just outright ban a site from your search results

Yeah I’m not a fan of using AI voice actors but this doesn’t seem like a terrible use. It’s pretty useful for reactions to dynamic events.

Btw the male voice sounds fine to me. It’s the female voice that sounds obviously fake imo

I think this is nice in a time when social media companies have been actively killing third-party apps

Unfortunately, most of the original team is gone now. I hope they’ve moved on to better things

I don’t think social media is the problem. It’s the fact that something like 60% of children aged 7-14 have watched Andrew Tate. There’s just so much more shit out there nowadays than there was in the past. I don’t care if kids see a dead body or porn on the internet, I care that there are some people with sinister ideologies who are doing serious damage to impressionable children. And it’s just an endless of stream of content that caters to our worst instincts in a way that is not healthy for development as a human. This shit is like a drug for constant dopamine.

When I was a kid I swore not to be someone who acted like I do now, but yknow what? I didn’t have near as much knowledge or experience. I thought I knew everything back then but the reality is that, yeah, sometimes adults do know better. I’m a big advocate for more freedoms for adolescents because I genuinely believe they are treated like shit in society but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still some lines that you have to draw

I agree the issue is systemic and those issues need to be solved first. The main problem is that kids are not learning how to socialize as much as they used to and you can see this reflected in data about the number of friends and romantic partners going down. The most important thing that we need to do is rebuild local communities and have places where people can meet, have events, and spend times getting to know new people

I completely get where you're coming from and this is something I think about a lot. There are so many people I know (myself included) who have benefited as kids from being able to access the internet and find a community, but overall the data I've seen shows a net negative in terms of social outcomes. And to be completely honest I just think that a lot of spaces on the internet suffer from having too many adolescents around.

I don't want to enforce a law or something but I think we just need to be more socially aware of the kinds of spaces that kids have access to