I am in the U.S. I don’t need to read an 80 year old fictional story to know the current state of affairs. My employer has a $3.5 billion back load of orders to fill. Too many people are vested in the success of America. Even if it were to collapse in <cough> 500 years, all of us will be dead and gone. Why would I be worried about that when there are thousand of unexpected ways for mayhem and destruction to plague the planet without the U.S. even being affected.
I think there is a far bigger risk of the U.S. exploding rather than collapsing. We sit on top of the world’s largest super volcano. Canadians would likely die from that too if it happened. My point is that there are far bigger things to be concerned about.
I was reading a social media site one day and a new blurb popped up about someone driving off the road in North Carolina and dying. The person wasn’t anyone noteworthy. It was just one sad event. One isolated loss of life. I went to the internet and looked up statistics on how many people die on any given day. I quickly did the math and realized that reading about every random death that happens in the day is an EXTREMELY poor use of my time. I would have no time to do anything actually constructive. I felt that the site was wasting my time with news that is inconsequential to my choices in life. It was needlessly depressing. It was completely useless news. Debating on whether the U.S. will collapse is an equal waste of my time. Even if inevitable mechanisms are in place, we will all be dead before it happens.
My occupation gives me a sense of self-respect. I know that our (i.e. my employer’s) products have been pro-actively attempting to make the world a better place. We donated $2 million & medical equipment to New York City after 9/11. We provided equipment to desalinate water for Israel. We built Guinness World record breaking mining equipment for Belarus. Wind farms. Solar power generation. Hybrid buses. Covid detection kits. If I retire today, I know that my individual contribution to the world will have positively affected millions of people.
For that reason, I’m taking my time to tell you, there are more important issues to discuss. This little pea soup of fear in which your brain is locked into is not a constructive use of anyone’s time. Too many people in the world are reactive rather than being proactive. Don’t be the flag flapping in the wind. The world is what we make it, and it is not just us waiting for some news story to react to. The best decision making in life is not done from the perspective of fear. That’s why Donald Trump was an idiot. He promoted fear. He made stupid choices out of fear. Be constructive.
I meant to say that allowing comments is a selling point or promotional aspect because it keeps users engaged and give them a reason to come back. They have a reason to revisit the blog, see new posts, and comment on old posts. Having run a message board for over 20 years, I’ve observed that when people visit without posting something back, the quicker traffic dries up to almost nothing.
The usenet was essentially public email without all the HTML baggage. You searched for a group that interested you on public news servers. You subscribed to it and immediately interacted with people who shared your interests. The groups had a moderator to keep things on track. Typically, moderation was not a problem and I didn’t even know who the moderator was. Deja news archived the old posts and you could follow old threads to know what had been written before. Eventually, spam overtook the groups and it was too much to avoid. There were pay services, but most ISP’s had a news server and you could just follow the public groups for free.
I do very little to entice subscribers to follow me and I manually delete old posts after I felt people had time to review them and comment. I don’t want 20 years of my life online. People grow and change over time. Despite that general tendency, I’ve grown followers on Pixelfed at a faster rate than I have on most Social media sites. One person said my posts were filling up his feed and that’s why he hadn’t followed my account. That’s another reason I feel that following someone should not dump everything into your main feed. Following someone should just make it easier to access their posts. It should force it to be seen.
My song playlists had themes if I listened to one. I’ve owned a lot of albums that were 50% great songs and 50% duds. I do listen to albums if I know the album is consistent throughout.
I do like the complete randomness of Mastodon, but I have a huge blocklist that probably ties up a lot of system resources in the background. Misskey is very interesting, but I feel that some of it is broken and some of it is not very intuitive (such as expanding a thread.)
My biggest problem with social media is that if I follow someone, I’m not interested in seeing everything that everyone posts in my feed. I want to be able to select the users separately and view their specific posts when I’m in the mood. I don’t want everything jumbled together. I usually don’t follow anyone and just click on their profile instead. That’s disheartening to the people who do post things that interest me. I’m looking forward to pixelfed introducing groups. Being old school in my tastes , I prefered the old usenet format better and using a feed reader. Spam (& google) ruined the old usenet format.
If I stood by Mark Zuckerburg 24 hours a day and wrote down everything he did, he’d be calling the police on me. This is exactly what he’s doing to Facebook users, he’s just doing it more deceptively. I consider his platform to be unethical and committing illegal activities remotely. Regardless of Capitalism being the motive, the act itself is already considered to be illegal offline. Why would people feel that it’s okay online?