Americans Are Trapped in an Algorithmic Cage

People want things to be easy. I feel like there is a startup opportunity here to manage peoples connections to more federated services. Give them an easy 1 place to log into Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc if you want me to get off of Twitter and Instagram.

I've never had a Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Myspace whatevertheF account and I've never felt like I was missing out. Social media can be great, if by social media you mean: something like IRC/Discord, or something ultra-simplistic like HN. Anything else and you're making a bad trade.

People keep trying to find a way to have their cake and eat it too, despite decades of clearly seeing that you can't. I'm starting to become very tired of this victim-mentality that demands the convenience of highly centralized, moderated, and connected algorithmic social media, but ALSO want it to be run the way they think it should be.

You want out of the "cage"? Log off.

This article makes it sound like private companies are the ones doing the manipulation. That's not the problem.

The problem is that anyone in the world with enough interest and very little resources can influence the thoughts and actions of large groups of people. Adtech has built these tools to manipulate people into opening their wallets, yet the same tools can be used for much sinister purposes. Everything from propaganda to election interference to destabilizing a nation from the inside out. It's pretty evident that the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing for more than a decade now in not just the US, but many western countries, is in large part the product of domestic and foreign operations carried out to fulfil some agenda.

Social media companies are not in control. They're in the data market business because the business is boomin', and they can't (nor won't) control who uses their tools because it would be bad for business.

The only way any of this might improve is with government regulations. But considering that governments are in symbiosis with Big Tech, which is nowhere clearer than in the US now, and that at this point the public considers these services essential, judging only by the pushback against banning an app built by a political adversary, the chance any regulations will hit Big Tech is slim to none.

America is doomed, but they shit their bed and now must lie in it.

I pretty much watch youtube and hacker news. That’s about it.

The article details the problems succinctly, and then finishes with a question about behavior. We as HN audience have the tendency to think about technical solutions to societal problems. Partly because that is what we are good at, partly because we have difficulty seeing the greater picture. We feel powerless as tech-ability is not a real currency in real life, like social skills. And so nihilism creeps in.

Instead of grasping to technological changes, ask yourself what basic limits should serve as guard rail for the application of tech. If social media are a net loss to mental health, if they pump around unprecedented amounts of fake information, if they replace real, livid interactions with real and diverse people, if they destroy the fabric of society and thus increase misery, if they fill your living years with fake emotions, all those things just to give some more advertisement dollars to some nihilists that are bored to death will all that money and now want to own all of you, will you still say: ah, I cannot do anything about it?

My 2ct: present the bill to the oligarchs. A public space is property of the public, not some billionaires. Outlaw all the negatives consequences. You will keep some fora for wood working enthusiast, some communities for hardware tinkerers, some sites about knitting, the good old internet. That's it.