If Television stayed live, local, honest, people you seen around your local town, it would encourage engagement. youtube could have focused on sharing videos with friends, could have ignored likes/dislikes and didnt focus on popularity and parasocial relationships. Facebook could have encouraged not on finding, adding, expanding, friends and engaging on the platform, but instead encourage real connections by encouraging prodding for real world meetups suggestions on games to play in person, finding people who like to do the similar things and suggesting times and places they can do it together with a focus on existing friends and connections. And not showing as much on what people have done but what they can do together.

Its not that these things aren't possible on the networks now but its not how these sites use their influence and primary resources, and really it would be stupid for them to do, because they are businesses and their goal is to make money, they will only improve peoples lives as long as it doesn't get in the way of making money. Part of use realize what they are doing we know they put profits above us, but they deliver what we expect a little bit of happiness a little bit of connection, we know it wont satisfy us but its easy, real easy with no risk, why put effort in for maybe a solid human connection when you can have that quick and easy hit right now.

If you read this far, why is scientific studies, or science in general not going to fix this? Because even if there is perfect research that spells out exactly the issue and lays out exactly how to not be lonely 2 things are going to happen.

1. Companies will exploit it in a way to make money if not right away then over time putting us right back to where we were. 2. We wont do it because we prefer the easy/fast way even if its worse.

this isnt going to change, its not that we cant have real connections, its just we have never had so many easy alternatives before, for a lot of people being alone has become the default we grew up with instead of the exception.

Its completely understandable that the average person THINKS that sms is secure, everyone depends on their phones, uses it for very personal, private and sensitive business calls. even without tech companies using it for auth it would be exploited, just not as much. Unfortunately it would just take an incredible amount of cooperation, expense and growing pains to properly secure the telecom network. They are extremely interconnected legacy systems that are designed with the assumption there is no security besides trust. that being said they could improve things a whole lot more if they were able to verify their customers better on support calls or at least had higher security options you could enroll in. So they didnt put people who cared about security with the ones who cant even keep track of their own account numbers.

Personally without governments coming together to implement a digital "secure" citizen identification system (also very scary) probably the best we can hope for and i think google now allows is after its verified by phone remove it as a authentication and recovery option and setup multiple hardware security keys/passkeys. ya people will still be idiots and use sms even when there are better options but at least some of us can be secure.

but when talking about what i consider legit products: 1. The difference may make something improved to one person but worse for someone else - i find most times the older os's faster with windows and android. part of that reason is the include graphical transitions and animations when doing things. turning them off makes them feel fast like the older versions. there are more features, hardware support, ect one person may dislike not need those new features or animations but most do like them 2. Adapting to changing circumstances - When google started out no body knew or maybe even had a strong reason to manipulate google results. Google itself might be significantly better but the internet and people using it has changed its not the Tech that degraded its the people using and manipulating it creating new challenges that were never faced before. 3. In the past it may have worked better for you but now it is more sustainable/better for everyone - in a extreme example during the dot com boom i could make money ($20-$30) just by having a ad bar at the bottom of my screen for a few hours a day(even when i wasnt on it). But the only way it worked was because a bunch of idiot investors were loosing a ton of money. Has advertising got worse? to me sure but in reality they just went to a reasonable business model as much as i would prefer to get paid good money for having ad's on my screen.

All that being said are there companies who make tech worse just for greed and profit absolutely, but its not a black and white situation and there is a lot more factors than people usually realize.

one of my "it got worse" but not really experiences is with phones when phones were analog for my normal use case of making local phone calls when there were just land lines calls, were always clear no latency issues and extremely rarely had issues. now with digital and voip there can be delay's and choppiness and audio cutting in and out and really low quality audio and i sometimes complain about how it used to just work. but really i can now call anywhere in the world for free, have cheap and easy to setup phones with amazing features not depend on one phone company and can easily switch between. so ya in the most common calling situation its worse but overall its so so much better.

I think a lot of people dont care enough to upload info just to help product designers, some will do it to help out other consumers, but if you can provide more value to the person with the product you want info on that should get you the most engagement.

The root of the problem is society valuing their own money/things over people. one person or organization changing wouldn't change things significantly, and the rest in the chain will probably pressure them back. Sadly society is moving further away from valuing people. online shopping, crypto currency, automation as much as i love all these advancements they enable and increases the value of things over people, and in turn a concentration of wealth and power.

at the end he makes the argument that we no longer sell things but narratives hold value. The issue with his argument is informed consent. Informed is the key here he says that people buying the $PEOPLE token know its worthless except for being part of history. Thats not accurate real money was initially paid so many people will assign a value to it since it cost money despite what its current real value is. They would also be a part of it whether they put in a cent or a $1000 into it. it went so high in value because people speculated that their money would get them more future value in it than other more traditional options. but wait then its just a speculative investment like other crypto. Not really scammers use the narrative to deceive people of the real value. people pay for the equivalent of scams eg escorts, escape rooms, romance novel's if you convince them through a narrative that its real they pay far more.

i wrote too much already but his idea of paying people on completion of an action online is a refining and progression of the already damaging effect of targeted adverting and influencers. How much worse do you think scam advertisements and foreign and domestic manipulation could be if they could dangle a carrot instead of just a picture or video on the side?

I think any content creator dreams of making a simple narrative worth millions of dollars or being able to dangle money in front of their viewers to make them dance but as far as im concerned we have gotten too close to that reality already and doing so will just make things worse.

The subject, just as with the value may have no real way of knowing the cost and risk. most will assume there is no value, cost or risk like virtually every other photo and have no problem with it. Or they will think of those ever so rare photos that they see all the time at the top of their feed and either want far to much in compensation or never allow any photos they cant control taken.

The problem isnt really consent its that the photographer and subject cant predict the future. If the photographer knew the photo would never see general public viewing, win any prizes be seen by the subject or anyone they know. both the photographer and subject wouldn't care about consent. on the other hand if the photographer knew exactly how popular, how much value would be derived from it and the cost it would have on the subject they wouldn't hesitate to get consent and maybe offer some compensation based on the cost the photo would have on the subjects life.

it is however so rare a single photo has significance on anything, that everyone just assumes its not worth getting consent. only photo's where someone expects privacy is it assumed the cost to the subject is usually too high and requires consent.

the only way for an entity to never comply with government orders and continue to function is to remain anonymous and their servers accessible only via temporary addresses or tor since static ip's and domains can be taken away. Making it impossible for receiving email and more effort than the average person would want to access. It then becomes a catch 22 as you cant fully trust an anonymous, transient entity since their motivation can never be verified(they could be a honey trap), they can rarely be held accountable if they betray you, and they could be replaced or compelled to comply without anyone knowing(someone part of a visible physical social network could have friends put out a warning if something suspicious happened to them).

What it comes down to is what we already know. they only way to be sure your email provider wont hand over your emails is to run your own email server anonymously. For anyone who cant do that protonmail is still likely the best choice even if its imperfect. plus adding whatever other layers of protection on top you are capable of.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

The ban would be great news to the existing gas stations as well would be interesting to know how busy they currently are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

A lot of people love not having options and having these decisions made for them.

I would never want a device like that or with something that scans my device, but I think the vast majority of their customers if they even hear about it will think "I trust apple, they know what's best, it wont affect me"

Im ok with apple doing it because i think most apple users will be ok with it. I would not be ok with it if all Android devices started doing it though.