Keep it up, baby

They’re also MUCH more susceptible to misinformation and propaganda than the “in-between” generations. They aren’t as affected by traditional media, sure, but their new media sources are heavily propagandized, with visibility manipulated by the worst people in the world. They might HEAR about the dangers of misinformation or propaganda in the periphery, but with their primary interface being a handful of apps on a mobile device, there’s not much they can do about it without extensive education they aren’t getting.

There are more assholes than good people because assholery typically delivers better results in terms of wealth, power, and status, and good people have to accept a lower social status in order to maintain their goodness, but most people don’t fall into either category.

But the vast majority of people fall into an apathetic middle ground where they don’t really think too much about any kind of moral consistency and act according to paths they’re already on and the rules those paths require.

There’s no way that wasn’t the real Mark Twain.

The search bar is an absolute disaster that not only searches your phone, it also sends your search to Google, and if you have, like me, a 128 Gb microSD card, it’s also going to SLOWLY search through the unindexed million files on THERE, chugging along and MAYBE finishing in 2 or 3 minutes.

“files” is an unnavigatable crapshoot, offering “suggested” recent files that didn’t populate because the last 10 most recent files didn’t even get picked up by the scanning service yet, reordering any list of files bigger than 10 things takes FOREVER, half the directories are aliased in 12 places so you’re navigating a loop, and even if you FIND the file there’s no guarantee you can OPEN it because the directory might be protected.

Downloads is a complete freaking mess. If you have a flash card, your stupid Android phone will duplicate all the user directories on it and half your apps will download to the card and the other half to your system memory, and Google’s useless scanning service that’s supposed to keep track of recent downloads goes off on magical adventures for hours at a time so you can locate your downloaded file TOMORROW if it gets around to it.

You’re right… The fact that I can fight with the stupid thing for 20 minutes to get to my file doesn’t mean it’s literally “impossible”. It just means it’s broken, barely usable crap that I refuse to tolerate because I like products that WORK.

It’s impossible to figure out where your PDF downloaded on Android. And then if I miraculously DO find it, whoops - my reader crashed because it doesn’t have permissions to read from that folder. All modern mobile OS tech is a disaster.

At least we could get the fax machine to do things. The touch screen is so many layers of abstraction away from any raw functionality it’s like the pull string on a See and Say.

See, THAT is not the slippery slope. STARTING to ban ANYTHING at all from legal transactions is the slippery slope. What happens when they decide R-rated films are distasteful? Or birth control?

Payment processors should have ABSOLUTELY no role in making ANY decisions about what legal transactions they process. Period.

Look, I’ll give you what you want. Yes, many, many more people saw the video because they want to watch video. It will have a bigger impact. Maybe even save the effort!

NONE of that answers any of the concerns that video as the default format of record is shortsighted and transient. It doesn’t address any of the concerns I’ve already listed. It doesn’t address the issue of LANGUAGE. It doesn’t address the issue of ACCESSIBILITY. It doesn’t address the issue of ARCHIVAL. If video is our primary method of communication and record keeping from here on, then our history is already lost. Our access to it is only through an untrustworthy gatekeeper and our own collective memory, which we have seen again and again over the past few decades is absolutely awful and in some cases worse than nothing. No victory we win now means ANYTHING if long term we forget the fight, and companies just come at it again when people are paying less attention and conditions are more favorable. Which is what’s happening. Again and again.

Nothing I say or do is going to convince people otherwise. People actively and gleefully gather with others who don’t like hard truths to convince each other that everything is fine, and that the convenient direction is the correct one, and they will continue to do so. But if you can honestly say, with all objectivity, that none of these problems are real or matter? Well, I’m glad to be an old fart who’s not going to live to see the fallout.

I did not suggest that Youtube the service is going away. But I AM suggesting that a little bit of pressure on Google from ANY one of the major companies that would be affected by EU action on game preservation would EASILY cause them to just shut the channel down, or remove the video. If it gets enough following? EA just has to threaten to pull their ads with youtube, and it’s gone. It doesn’t even have to be visible. You’d never even know it. And even if you knew it, and wanted to counter, where else could you PUT it? You can put text ANYWHERE. Find me other places to host long-form video with any reliability.

I am ALSO not suggesting in the short term that there is somewhere he can get a bigger audience. I AM suggesting that in the LONG term the costs of using video as a platform are high.

And years from now is not about obsolescence, it’s about HISTORY. Ten, twenty years from now, will there be enough information available for someone to understand what’s happening now? The details of this moment? And it is RELEVANT. The details of what happened 20, 30 years ago inform everything that happens in the world now, just as the details of what’s happening NOW will inform the future. We ALREADY have people defending Nintendo running illegal pressure tactics because they don’t understand the history of what’s already decided law on emulation. What happens when people get to the future and need to know what happened here with SKG, and the detailed commentary is youtube videos, half of which have had their channels shut down or gone private, and the other half of which is in unsearchable algorithmic social media and discords that have disappeared? We live in a world where everyone screams their facts and half the people automatically follow it regardless of accuracy, and at the same time we’re putting our most detailed information into the most transient and ephemeral format possible. There are already millions of youtube videos that are just GONE. They can’t be seen… can’t even be searched - there’s not even a placeholder that something WAS there. Who’s to say there was anything? Who’s to say what it DID say? Are we relying on memory?

I can’t CONVINCE you that’s a bad idea. It should be self-evident. But if it isn’t, I can’t make it any clearer.

The ultimate solution is steering people away from video and back to text, which can be backed up and archived and duplicated easily and in perpetuity, and no, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t even know that it’s possible. But mark my words, this is not a benign, generational transition. This is a shift that’s going to have major negative consequences, and all the downvotes in the world will not change that reality.

There is more to information than reach. Youtube is a single point of failure. If Google decides to shut down his channel, his material is gone. It’s a memory hole. It’s been pulled out of the collective consciousness. Text can be replicated easily and anywhere. Not even the wayback machine can back up video with any consistent reliability. People FEEL like they’re fighting the power with youtube, but it’s the easiest possible way to shut down information, because normal people cannot host video.

Also, Europe is 745 million people, the vast majority of which do not speak English as a first language. They are the ones who need to see this. This video has ONE set of auto-generated subtitles. If I’m a Pole, I can translate your text by machine. It’s not ideal, but it WORKS. What is the majority of Europe supposed to do with this?

And before you say “everyone in Europe speaks multiple languages”, that is NOT something you can rely on. It’s a selection bias - most of the people you interact with in Europe speak English so you get the idea everyone does, cutting off the huge percentage who do not. They need information too. They still vote.

Less effort, at the cost of WAY more time.

And it needs to be said - meeting people “where they are” instead of making them be better is generally how we’ve gotten into such a horrible place in the FIRST place. “People like SaaS because it’s easier and they don’t care if things go away. They accept it.”

Maybe, just maybe, we should stop letting people dig themselves into comfortable holes and then try to lure them back out via new tunnels. Call them out on crawling into the holes in the first place.

Also, Snot Flickerman, while being excessively confrontational, is not wrong. 21% of US adults are considered functionally illiterate, and a large percentage of the remaining 79% aren’t able to read the MEANING beyond a literal understanding, and I’m sorry, this is a problem to be dealt with, not an expression of neurodiversity - audio/visual stimulation DOES NOT stimulate the same critical thinking centers of the brain. It just does NOT. There are DECADES of research on this.

And this is BEFORE we consider that uploading video to Youtube is putting information EXCLUSIVELY into the hands of a multi-billion dollar company that is NOT on your side and can shut it down for any reason they choose, removing it from the collective consciousness. You can copy and paste and move text around wherever you want. You CANNOT do the same with video. This is a memory hole. There are consequences to this. If you don’t SEE them, that’s a problem.

You know, I don’t even disagree with that sentiment in principle, but expecting people to suffer when they could benefit from a technology because they only see the threats and dangers makes them no different than antivaxxers.

It is possible and logically consistent to urge caution and condemn the worst abuses of technology without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Removed by mod

Look, if you can afford therapy, really, fantastic for you. But the fact is, it’s an extremely expensive luxury, even at poor quality, and sharing or unloading your mental strain with your friends or family, particularly when it is ongoing, is extremely taxing on relationships. Sure, your friends want to be there for you when they can, but it can put a major strain depending on how much support you need. If someone can alleviate that pressure and that stress even a little bit by talking to a machine, it’s in extremely poor taste and shortsighted to shame them for it. Yes, they’re willfully giving up their privacy, and yes, it’s awful that they have to do that, but this isn’t like sharing memes… in the hierarchy of needs, getting the pressure of those those pent up feelings out is important enough to possibly be worth the trade-off. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. Would it be better if these systems were anonymized? Absolutely. But humans are natural anthropomorphizers. They develop attachments and build relationships with inanimate objects all the time. And a really good therapist is more a reflection for you to work through things yourself anyway, mostly just guiding your thoughts towards better patterns of thinking. There’s no reason the machine can’t do that, and while it’s not as good as a human, it’s a HUGE improvement on average over nothing at all.

I hope everyone learns the lesson from the Japanese dude who married his hologram just to watch her die when the service was shut down…

If your girlfriend isn’t running on your air-gapped hardware offline, she’s not your girlfriend.

Absolutely. I want to skim the important parts at my own pace. Not dedicate multiple minutes of attention to a video.

Now do Half-life 3.