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Americans' confidence in technology firms has dropped
- jruohonen 3y agoMatches made in heaven: Twitter, Congress, political parties, and Facebook, in that order.
- hashtag-til 3y agoTech companies have been working very hard over the last years to achieve this drop in confidence: sketchy use of people's data; incentivising/promoting hate-speech and misinformation in exchange for engagement in their platforms; micro targeting for advertisement, etc. etc. Not surprised at all to see the massive drop in trust in Twitter for example. I think it was a healthy choice to drop all my social networks utilisation - happy I did.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Podgajski 3y agoThe time is really right for an open source, nonprofit tech platform that can provide email video conferencing, chat, and file storage.
- bantunes 3y agoNonprofits aren't a panacea here - I remember a piece recently on how their executive salaries are sometimes very high and detract from the nonprofit's original purpose.
- mandmandam 3y agoWait until you read about the executive salaries of for-profit companies - hoo-boy. OP has a point - the incentives for tech companies are profoundly fucked right now. We need to get the profit motives aligned with the good of society.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoPlus, many tech nonprofit organizations have agendas that are far from the organization's founding mission. These outside interests often come to dominate the organization's spending and the core mission gets neglected.
- Dalewyn 3y agoMozilla is a shining example of that.
- nologic01 3y agoIts not just social media. Search is also extremely important. Whether alternatives are open source or commercial it is not so important. Certainly good quality open source solutions would force commercial enterprise to "work for the money" rather than extract rents. What is important is to outlaw practices relating to data collection and targeted ads, and break down monopolistic conditions. Basically you want a healthy mix of commons infrastructure and private enterprise that respects common values and promotes innovation. Its not rocket science but of-course decades-long inaction makes it feel like having to move mountains.
- jbotdev 3y agoJust like “this is the year of the Linux Desktop”? I’d love to have an open non-profit alternative to Google’s productivity suite, but realistically it’s very hard to host those things outside a traditional for profit business. Building the open source software is the easy part, and has been done already. The hard parts are things like email deliverability, and getting people to pay for what’s typically a free ad-supported service.
- Podgajski 3y agolinux is not nonprofit, it’s no profit. There’s a difference. I would gladly pay for a linux operating system. Problem has been that they’re giving away a great product for free. Open source developers could get paid under a nonprofit model, not under the current no profit model.
- shipscode 3y agoThe time is right for devs to work for free? Seems unlikely..
- Podgajski 3y agoNonprofit does not mean employees work for free, in fact, it’s just the opposite. Do you think linux devs are not working for free right now? Nonprofit employees have salaries. It was a nonprofit co-op they would have even more control over their lives.
- shipscode 3y agoHow does that explain nonprofit salaries being trash though? I haven’t seen any that have kept up with inflation, hardly for-profit orgs have.
- Ekaros 3y agoHow do you run essentially a commercial business as non-profit? Hosting has cost inherent and those have to be paid for. Either by advertising which won't work in this case or by subscriptions or donations. And I don't think there is enough donations...
- ejb999 3y agonot saying it is easy - but 'non-profit' is not 'non-revenue' - there are many big non-profits with thousands of employees and billions in revenue - i.e. MassGeneral medical system for example: 16 billion in revenue and 20,000 employees.
- JohnFen 3y agoBeing a non-profit doesn't mean you can't make money.
- pravus 3y agoI've thought along the same lines. I currently have some personal projects going in this direction. My vision is to create a set of tools that would allow you to set up a micro infrastructure to self-host all of these services on any cloud/hosting provider with a reasonable API. I have professional experience with all of the technologies involved and the biggest hurdles are getting time to work on it and dealing with the absolute horror that is HTML/CSS/Mobile. Once I can get enough built I can farm that out to someone else, though. In the meantime I'm still hoping to win the lottery while not wasting any money on tickets :)
- nonameiguess 3y agoI suspect you're not saying this in the obvious literal sense. Signal is a nonprofit that provides video and chat you can attach files to and there are various other open protocols that have existed for decades with open-source clients you can use to hook into the network. If you want one producer to many consumers, many producers to one consumer publishing platforms, those also exist. PBS and NPR are nonprofit platforms anyone can consume from and anyone can attempt to publish to, but they have to adhere to basic content-worthiness and editorial standards. What I think you really want, and why YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok became so popular in the first place, is a platform to which anyone can publish anything, provided it isn't illegal or offensive to the platforms' more limited but not completely non-existent content guidelines, and some sort of promotional feed for that content gets directly pushed to consumers to facilitate discoverability of producers who are not already famous by some other means. File storage seems largely orthogonal from the consumer point of view. People can already put more video than they can watch in a lifetime, more text than they can read in a lifetime, on disks they personally own. It's the producers of regularly-uploaded, new multimedia streaming content that need someone else's disk space to serve their own content from. The dilemma seems obvious here. If you place no restrictions other than it can't be illegal on what anyone can serve to others, you've promised the world effectively infinite disk space. How can a nonprofit do that, keeping in mind that nonprofits need to have some sort of mission that puts them in a legal category making them eligible to incorporate as a nonprofit in the first place? For PBS and NPR, they serve an educational mission that qualifies them under 501(c)(3). But in order to do that, they need to have an editorial standard. They have to publish content that is actually educational. I'm actually curious now how Signal qualifies, as Signal Foundation is also a 501(c)(3). The IRS gives the following guideline: > The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency. Pro Publica's database lists them under the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities category "Community Improvement, Capacity Building / Business and Industry" (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...), but this isn't a legal category. I guess ask a lawyer, which I am not, but I suspect a prospective YouTube/TikTok replacement trying to convince the IRS they deserve to be exempt from taxes is going to have a tough time.
- nologic01 3y agoSome important takeaways, which are nevertheless not surprising: * its not about political affiliation (confidence drop higher in right-leaning groups)[1] * it is about education, the least educated show less confidence drop * it is about addiction, heavy users show less confidence drop [1] Though ultimately it is about politics, in the sense of what kind of market regulation one supports, the role of the public sector etc.
- verisimi 3y ago> * its not about political affiliation (confidence drop higher in right-leaning groups)[1] It's funny that you have to mention that its regardless of right-leaning groups suffering the greater drop. I guess we can now openly say that these companies do have left leaving political affiliation, but in some cases this simply isn't a factor.
- willis936 3y agoI'm not seeing the causation. Would you say government and taxes are left leaning concepts because right wing politics have goals of smaller government and less taxes?
- humanrebar 3y agoI'm not sure the right wing is all that libertarian and small government these days. It all seems pretty team red versus team blue with plenty of dog whistling all around. But not many principles.
- willis936 3y agoThere was a tax cut that led to a deficit, which is causing calls from the right to reduce spending. This seems like a principled effort to reduce government and taxes to me.
- humanrebar 3y ago
- gniv 3y ago"The 2021 survey, on the other hand, was well into the pandemic, which we would have thought would increase support for companies that brought people goods (Amazon) and information (Google) during a crisis." I think it actually worked the other way. A lot of folks had only occasional interactions with these companies before. But during the pandemic they had to use them more, so they had to experience more failures. Since negative experiences tend to dominate in our minds, the overall "trust" decreases.
- fullarr 3y agoEveryone had time to focus on it
- okdood64 3y ago> experience more failures Like what?
- andromeduck 3y agoCensorship, bad automation, bad support channels.
- gumballindie 3y agoWe need to do more to educate people about privacy violations and behaviour control. They (the average joes of the world) thought it was through "chips", when in fact it was as simple as an app sitting on your phone or in your browser, tv, car...and everything else capable of running software. Now the same data will be used even more aggressively to control people's behaviour. Spread the word and educate non technical people. It's working.
- fifteen1506 3y agoCare to educate? I know what you're referring to, but besides mindless zombies walking around, what's going on?
- qup 3y agoDropped? How can they get any lower? They're all spying on us and then losing the private data at incredible rates. I think I got three breach disclosure emails this month already.
- latexr 3y ago> How can they get any lower? As long as these platforms have one single user, they have someone’s trust.
- birdyrooster 3y agoYeah people trust them to steal their data and sell it.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI can't imagine why? Personally, Apple and now Kagi are the only companies I like to give money to. Apart from that, I like to donate time and money to open source.
- tomohelix 3y agoApple? I hate that company for the anti-competitive practices. They literally tried making everything proprietary. It took the entire EU and a targeted law to make them adopt the USB-C.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> They literally tried making everything proprietary. It took the entire EU and a targeted law to make them adopt the USB-C. Erm no, my MacBooks have had USB-C for a while, as USB-C is better for data transfer. Their proprietary version for phones predates USB-C, because it was far better than the alternative, and it presumably added competition that meant USB-C needed to exist and be invested in. That won't happen again, or at least in the EU markets.
- tomohelix 3y agoI don't think the first iterations of lightning was far better than USB 2. It has some features but overall was about the same. Then USB C came out and apple was left stagnant for more than 10 years with zero innovation. Also, the new law has nothing against making a better port than C so I think you are mistaken.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Also, the new law has nothing against making a better port than C so I think you are mistaken. How does that work, if they have to use USB-C?
- tomohelix 3y ago
- davemp 3y agoI think a big contributor to the public's lack of confidence is just worse product quality. Pretty much every non-search Google product I've used in the last 5 years has had major issues. It's not that we didn't have bugs before, they were just handled better. Nowadays when things error out the most helpful message you'll get is, 'something went wrong' giving you no clear way to work around an issue or report a bug. My confidence has certainly dropped in general tech.
- travoc 3y agoWhy did you omit Google's search product? It leads to so much clickbait AI-generated garbage content that it's basically unusable now unless you already know where you want it to take you.
- fullarr 3y agoNot to mention the obvious and manual manipulation of specific search results You know...for our own good because we can't be trusted to read
- footlose_3815 3y agoGoogle, Microsoft are leading the way in enshittification. Google is packed with advertisements now, their browser is now a direct feed to advertisers. Windows 11 is an online-always garbage OS that bombard you with unwanted promoted noise you can’t remove. LinkedIn is inundated with ads now. Something has got to give. We are going to make new solutions that don’t have all this bullshit.
- 8organicbits 3y agoThankfully, we're seeing a surge of alternate options. Mastodon's user base continues to grow and add user focused features [1], Firefox performance is on-par with Chrome, Bing/duckduckgo reached Google's search quality a while back and now exceed it since Google search added shit. 1. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoCompletely false, about Windows. There are (debunked) rumors that the next version of Windows will be online only, but it isn't now. And I don't see a trace of promotion in Windows 11. I forget how I disabled that 2 years ago when I installed it, but it wasn't difficult. Ubuntu, on the other hand, tries to sell me on Ubuntu Pro and Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications every time I log in. But I haven't looked into how to disable it so I won't make a false claim that it's something "you can't remove."
- pedrosbmartins 3y agoWeird, I've been using Ubuntu for quite a few years now, both in my work laptop and personal desktop, and have never even heard the terms "Ubuntu Pro" or "Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications."
- footlose_3815 3y agoI checked recently, and Windows 11, you cannot even use it without a internet and a Microsoft account. You used to be able to use a local account. And then after that enshittified, they made it so you used to be able to disconnect from the network and use a local account. And now, there's a terminal workaround that must be used now. I will throw shade at Ubuntu, as well. There's a ton of privacy and UX switches you need to flip just to make it your OS. And even then, it's got snap, so who needs it?
- fullarr 3y agoBig Tech needs a reckoning. They are stagnant because they outsource almost all real R&D to startups they can buy only after they've done the hard work of proving success I know it's not a monopoly per se, but it's anti-competitive and there's too many walled gardens
- ejb999 3y agolargely true of pharma companies as well - they are largely big marketing organizations, where most of the real R&D is done by small startups that can be purchased when necessary.
- fullarr 3y agoIt feels like part of it is a cultural issue. People in the startup space largely seem uninterested in starting companies they will run their whole life They just want the fun of experimentation and a payday And like that's fine whatever, live your life, but it's creating a really crappy feedback loop of monopolization and buy outs
- nickpp 3y agoAny single Nx buyout results in N additional startups being funded. This is how VC culture operates and grows. It’s one of the main ingredients that build Silicon Valley’s success. Other countries are desperate to copy this model.
- fullarr 3y agoI'm not arguing that it doesn't work and create a feedback loop I'm arguing it's destructive long-term by creating a Goliath no one can compete with Or several Goliaths in this case Consolidation leads to stagnation
- nickpp 3y agoGoliaths were and will always be around. But as long as there is an unregulated, free market - there will always be startups competing. It’s not easy, but it’s doable through innovation and creativity. The Goliaths are always more conservative, slower and less agile.
- seydor 3y agoAbout time
- legendofbrando 3y agoWould have been fascinating to see what names like Apple would have looked like on this list. Macro the trend is correct but I’d be curious to see how different it would look for what is commonly regarded as a more trusted brand. FB, Google and Amazon are sort of the “worst of” players in the space reputation wise.