Right. Prior to social media, people were vetted many ways and in every context in which they gained an audience. (e.g. earned standing in social settings and community groups, promotions at work, editors of one sort or another when publishing to a group, etc) Audiences grew incrementally as people earned their audience. Social media removed all that vetting and it inverted the criteria to grow an audience. Sensationalism was rewarded over thoughtfulness. So one of the most important tools we've always relied on to judge information was removed. Hard to believe, as intelligent as these folks at Facebook/Meta are said to be, that they don't understand this. Feels disingenuous.
Maybe start by actually hiring a doctor, a person you can form a relationship with, rather than a health care system/company. The doctor may charge high fees, but their behavior is more likely to be bound by the relationship, and societal expectations around decency and respect between people. This dynamic does not exist between companies (read health care systems) and the people they supposedly serve, but both internal and external corporate incentives -however well meaning or small when considered alone- come together to extract as much money as possible.
In the US, this model is usually called "concierge medicine." It sounds weird but it's exactly what you want for a GP relationship IF you can handle the fees ($1-2K annually, and that's going to be out of pocket).
What do you mean by presented? If I have a friend who has 4000 friends and I am their 4000th most important friend, I would sufficiently believe that a generic post of mine would not appear at the top of their feed and they might not see it.
I get the idea of not having all the "so and so friend liked so and so's post" which feel low quality in a feed, but part of a custom feed is prioritizing updates from people you actually want to see updates from
If you were making the choice as to which friends you wanted to hear from or updates you wanted to receive from you're friends, then I take you point. When someone else, or their algorithm, makes these decisions that is something else and it may actually veer into censorship.
Hm. This argument falls flat to me. A feed is considered editorialized by you, but nearly any combo of content is editorialized to some degree. A magazine makes editorial decisions on where in the magazine articles are placed... this does not mean its censorship, it just means you haven't read the whole thing.
Also, the tools exists on all of these social media products to actually go and check on your friends' pages where you can see their updates. Nothing stops you from doing that and consuming the content you wish.
Well, however someone might consider feeds, we don’t have the ability to truly take control of them. At least in the case of Facebook, they mostly decide what we see and they very deliberately make the case that they are not a media company like the magazines. They are claiming they are not editorializing because the machines are making the decisions. (Albeit with instructions from their engineers.)
Those are different. In those cases content is sent to the intended recipients. Whether they see it or not is up to the receivers. In the case of some social media platforms, the platforms decide who should be sent the content, regardless of the sender’s intent.
I dunno. Andreessen’s service layer may make sense for some startups in some industries, but for other companies a check from the likes of Tiger might be better. And how far down the road will those services become rent?
Hoping municipalities around the country note that the amateur radio programs they've been depreciating over the last decade actually have a role to play in emergencies like major hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.
“They generate profits by compiling a profile of you from your data trail and then selling it to the highest bidder”
Connecting another dot on this point: The creation and widespread use of such profiles -which are not merely comprised of data, but are summary conclusions about people- may well make the U.S. into a genuinely caste society. Without rules regarding things like data aging, publicly accessible profile monitoring, and bad data correction… and when to provide some sort rehabilitation method, people will eventually become just a collection of their mistakes and forced into one bucket or another.
We need something akin to the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a set of laws that provide better guide-rails for when data can be collected, by who, for what purpose, when it can be sold or used for a purpose other than why it was first collected, etc.
Bought the same machine for my daughter in a sort of emergency situation. I thought I’d be returning it and ordering a higher spec machine, but never did. She plays games, runs Discord, has browser tabs open, watches YouTube, edits her own videos, etc all without any issues. And the battery is crazy good. I’m actually a little dumbfounded. It seems Apple has found a good formula for entry level machines in the new MacBook Air.
