Ultimately the only thing that will stop it is advertisers fleeing the site. They won’t be able to tell what portion of the ad views they are paying for are bots, but it sure will show up in the sales conversion figures. Bots don’t buy products that advertise to them.
Not who you messaged, but the “advocating violence” thing gets massively abused by conservative mods on r/politics. For example, on January 6, right as it was happening, right as a mob of thugs was storming the capital building trying to steal an election? I wondered out loud why this place was so unguarded. Why aren’t there machine gun nests opening up on the mob? Sorry, but if you try to form a mob to overthrow a democracy, that’s what you deserve. That’s how countries have dealt with such violent uprisings since time immemorial. You try to overthrow a lawfully elected government? Lethal violence is absolutely justified in such a case, and any reasonable person should acknowledge that. Violence is a tool governments unfortunately sometimes have to use. But the site policies do not acknowledge this. Violence is ultimately the core function of the state. See monopoly on violence. Discussing how the government will use one of its core defining functions is perfectly reasonable on a politics sub. Blind “do not advocate violence” policies are idiotic. And it’s not like it ever gets applied to people advocating for the US to bomb other countries. That doesn’t count as “advocating violence.” Oh, and of course the conservative subreddits never get banned even after openly encouraging an armed insurrection against a lawfully elected government.
Later we learned those troops were not stationed at the capital because Trump ordered them away. Didn’t reverse my ban though.
The same could be said for newspapers.
The vibe is still similar in some places. I get a lot out of lurking on some of the trans subreddits for instance. But yeah, anything outside of small niche communities has been enshittified into another Instagram.
There are reddit front ends you can access. Won’t let you actually participate, but if you just need to access a page for info, they work.
I hope when he gets canned they also ban him from the site itself.
AI can’t do a CEO’s job. A CEO is just a professional schmoozer. They’re there to interact with and sell the company’s services to a bunch of rich bastards. They’re basically a highly paid escort that mostly gets to keep their clothes on.
If you do not have a good time, I am going to find you, strap you to a chair, and flay you alive!
/s
Not in the same way, no. Medium does matter. We are physical embodied beings, and the objects we interact with matter. A dynamic digital medium will always be more distracting than a static paper one. Regardless of how much you lock the devices down, a dynamic backlit digital screen is intrinsically more distracting than pen and paper. And paper requires finer motor control than writing tablets, as the paper isn’t filled with text correction technology and auto-fill. Plus the simple tactile experience is more neurally engaging than a blank screen. It takes more skill to write on paper than it does a tablet.
Most of all, pen and paper is so much better at putting a student in the right place for learning. People use tablets primarily for entertainment. Students in high school today have been using tablets since they were toddlers. We’re handing them the same devices that were used to distract them at age 2, and then expecting them to be able to maintain focus. When you engage with a tablet, your brain is subconsciously expecting diversion and entertainment. When you make a choice to write something by hand, you’re activating an entirely different set of cognitive frameworks than when writing on a pad.
Remember, all knowledge is social and situational. No knowledge exists in a vacuum. Human beings are not computers you just upload software into. Students often have trouble transferring specific skills from one class setting to a comparable but slightly different one. They may be able to read a graph in a math class, but struggle interpreting the same kind of graph in the context of a science class.
We are physical beings with physical bodies and physical minds. Medium matters.
You can’t really write laws that just require people to offer a service indefinitely though. That’s how you end up locking some poor bastard in jail who honestly tried to start a good car company up, did the best they could, and then saw it all go under. No one would ever start a car company, lest they risk imprisonment if the thing went bankrupt despite their best efforts. Starting a car company is already a hugely risky endeavor. Now you’re asking people to risk imprisonment if the company fails. I’m generally in favor of locking up more CEOs. But there are plenty of ones committing real crimes. We don’t need to be inventing new ones to trap otherwise innocent people.
The way to do this right is to mandate a long but still limited period of cloud coverage, say 20 years. And require companies to put up a bond to cover the cost of third-party hosting these ongoing cloud service in the event they go bankrupt. Then also require all essential functions to work without cloud connectivity.
When did you stop dreaming of the future?
Doesn’t even need a technical solution. Could just be some law that in order to sell a vehicle:
A company has to maintain any cloud support for at least 20 years.
They have to put up a bond that will allow such services to continue even if they go belly up before those 20 years are through.
All vehicle features where cloud connections are not essential to their function must be operable without any cloud connection. So it’s fine if after 20 years you can’t pull the contacts from your google account to display on the car’s screen, or if GPS map updates no longer work. But the door locks or seat heaters better not be cloud connected.
Here’s my proposal to bring more whimsy to the world:
Let’s legalize piracy on the high seas…but only if the pirates use 17th century-level ships, tools, equipment, and weapons. It will still be legal for other ships to defend themselves, and they can use modern stuff. So no guarantee the historical reenacting pirates will survive. But in the off chance they do, they can keep whatever booty they plunder, and do so legally. Their ships will be too small and fragile to be a threat to big vessels like cargo ships. But it sure would make the lives of billionaire yacht owners more interesting…
“But this isn’t the 17th century. Billionaire yachts are not Spanish galleons laden with gold!” You shout!
But no worry, historically, pirates often took more than valuable cargo. They often seized entire vessels…
What you’re describing sounds like positive nihilism. Nihilism need not be a bad thing. At least as I understand it:
One can say, “all life is pointless, nothing matters, why do anything?” - negative nihilism
Another can say, “all life is pointless, nothing matters, why NOT do anything?” - positive nihilism
I would say positive nihilism describes my personal philosophy to an extent. I tell people that I don’t so much feel the universe is pointless, but a complete absurdity. The universe is mad, so embrace the madness! Mostly this just involves building less of a fear of judgment. What could you ever do that is sillier than the very world around you?
No. The technology itself is the problem. Tablets and laptops are not suited for ordinary classroom instruction. I don’t care if they’re delivered by a billion dollar private equity firm or a ragtag FOSS project.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020739X.2025.2584340
All this talk of FOSS is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The problem is the loss of embodied and kinesthetic learning. Pencil and paper is fundamentally superior at teaching students, as they have to engage far more areas of the brain than they do if passively engaging with a tablet.
I have a background in education. I’ve had a unique career that’s gone back and forth between engineering and education. I hold graduate degrees in both. I say this only as prologue.
I propose an eInk-based tablet device with both keyboard and stylus input which has network and (very) limited internet access that acts as both a textbook library, note taking device, and can be used to both receive and submit homework
While I agree with most of what you wrote, this part sticks out to me. I think the missing piece in your analysis is the human element, human neurology. The literature that’s been coming out in the years since devices were widely deployed has been pretty damning. It’s not just that the devices are distraction machines, though they certainly are that. It is that they are fundamentally, neurologically inferior methods of educating a student. It is not simply that computers are distraction engines. You can put two learners in completely distraction free environments, and ask one to learn on a tablet, and one with pencil and paper. Even with no distractions at all, the paper will be far superior.
We are physical embodied beings. A lot of tech folks like to think of themselves as some sort of disembodied soul piloting a meat robot, but that isn’t remotely how humans actually work. The body is just as much part of learning as the mind. Your mind is part of your body; and your body heavily influences your mind. Even your gut bacteria have an immense impact on your thought processes. Learning is not a passive process of absorbing information like a sponge. It requires active practice and synthesis, and the more modalities that experience occurs in, the better.
Here is how a traditional lecture works:
Here is how an electronic lecture works:
This is a fundamental problem with the technology. Again, we’re embodied creatures. Writing with a pen and paper is more of a full body experience than using a touch screen can ever be. Tech loves to “remove friction,” but friction is the only way you ever actually learn anything.
We need to get the computers out of regular classroom instruction entirely. I’m perfectly fine with computers in a lab or library where students take computer-intensive courses (like programming or CAD), but there should be zero electronic devices employed in the lessons of core academic subjects such as mathematics, language, the sciences, and social sciences.
Honestly that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Even if few people ever code themselves, learning a little logic is good for anyone.
The problem is the tech companies didn’t actually deliver on the promise. We didn’t hand kids devices that encouraged tinkering and discovery. We handed them locked-down iPads suitable only for content consumption, not knowledge creation.
I’m guessing all of that increase is bots.