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Everything these days seems to come with some monkey paw-esque catch to it. You can log into amazon and order millions of items to your home without getting up

Everything these days seems to come with some monkey paw-esque catch to it. You can log into amazon and order millions of items to your home without getting up off the couch, but amazon only shows you the same products over and over and what you get is probably counterfeit or broken because amazon doesn't care about quality and they've made reviews useless. You have endless entertainment for free on youtube, but it's all data collection and an algorithm dedicated to amplification of the worst aspects of your psyche. It'll entertain, and recommend you toward extremism. Don't even ask what it's doing to your kids. You can use social media to stay in touch with everyone you love, but mostly it will make you depressed, and you'll need to self-censor and craft your social media profiles to best promote your "brand" to satisfy the future potential employers who will google the shit out of you before hiring. You can have a tiny powerful computer in your pocket but it's designed primarily for tracking and media consumption. The engagement it's designed to extract from you comes at the cost of disengagement with the loved ones around you. We have more choices in our grocery stores than at any point in history, but that choice is largely an illusion since every brand is owned by one of a handful of corporations. Those corporations can be caught literally and knowingly poisoning you and your children and they'll not only stay in business, but they'll stay very profitable. It's really not the convenience of things that are the problem though, it's that none of the things we have are designed to serve us. Everything you buy* or use is working for someone else (often against your interests) and companies are dedicated to delivering the barest minimum required to sucker you into forking over your money, your data, and your control. Give me something that works great and works only for me and I'm perfectly satisfied with it. *it isn't yours.

cnity 4y ago
Yes. The best thing to do is to try your best to make something that makes at least one person truly joyous.
anon7725 4y ago
> You have endless entertainment for free on youtube, but it's all data collection and an algorithm dedicated to amplification of the worst aspects of your psyche. It'll entertain, and recommend you toward extremism. My spouse and I never use the YT homepage, where these recommendations are made. We have two use cases: search for something specific 5% of the time, view videos from subscribed channels 95% of the time. The subscriptions feed shows a nice, clean timeline of all videos ordered by upload date. So we get none of the “recommendation rabbit hole effect”. I do wish that one could have multiple named lists of subscriptions so that we could separate things out by interest. FWIW, this is the YT app on AppleTV.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  I only go to the subscriptions page thus all my recommendations are from people I'm subbed to or similar creators. You gotta give the algo good data in to get good data out.
spacemadness 4y ago
Essentially we’ve given aspects of community fulfillment corporate control and true healthy human fulfillment through community is not profitable to shareholders.
loa_in_ 4y ago
> amazon doesn't care about quality and they've made reviews useless And, even more hurtful to any trust one might have in such a party (it's not unique to US or Amazon), seeing the reviews being introduced with great promise, serving their purpose for a time but almost imperceptibly degrading to being an antithesis almost od their promise and purpose. Even if execution is great, such technological "solutions" to complex problems end up degrading to zero net value add, or even a net negative over their time of being "live".

cnity 4y ago

Yes. The best thing to do is to try your best to make something that makes at least one person truly joyous.

anon7725 4y ago

> You have endless entertainment for free on youtube, but it's all data collection and an algorithm dedicated to amplification of the worst aspects of your psyche. It'll entertain, and recommend you toward extremism. My spouse and I never use the YT homepage, where these recommendations are made. We have two use cases: search for something specific 5% of the time, view videos from subscribed channels 95% of the time. The subscriptions feed shows a nice, clean timeline of all videos ordered by upload date. So we get none of the “recommendation rabbit hole effect”. I do wish that one could have multiple named lists of subscriptions so that we could separate things out by interest. FWIW, this is the YT app on AppleTV.

bobsmooth 4y ago
I only go to the subscriptions page thus all my recommendations are from people I'm subbed to or similar creators. You gotta give the algo good data in to get good data out.

spacemadness 4y ago

Essentially we’ve given aspects of community fulfillment corporate control and true healthy human fulfillment through community is not profitable to shareholders.

loa_in_ 4y ago

> amazon doesn't care about quality and they've made reviews useless And, even more hurtful to any trust one might have in such a party (it's not unique to US or Amazon), seeing the reviews being introduced with great promise, serving their purpose for a time but almost imperceptibly degrading to being an antithesis almost od their promise and purpose. Even if execution is great, such technological "solutions" to complex problems end up degrading to zero net value add, or even a net negative over their time of being "live".