> If the customers prefer the walled garden then what’s the big deal?
What the customers "prefer" and what's good for society are two very different questions. Anti-competitive behavior for one, like charging your direct competitors a 30% tax on their revenue because you own the platform, ensuring that you always come out ahead.
> There are a number of other phones people can buy
I don't understand this argument. For smartphones there's just one viable alternative which is itself trending in the walled garden direction. Google has been imposing additional restrictions for sideloading and adding various roadblocks that are slowly reeling back user freedoms.
Both companies have a long list of customer-hostile behaviors and we have to pick one of them because interoperability is dead. Because we have to pick one, there's no real pressure to address those grievances on either side.
It's always "just use Android" when we complain about Apple and "just use iOS" when we complain about Google. It's like that scene out of South park with the Cable company people rubbing their nipples listening to disgruntled customers.
There are Apple phones and there are Android phones, that's pretty much it. It's a duopoly. It is practically impossible for a third player to enter the market. This circular logic of "if Android does not offer enough liberties, use an Apple phone" and "if Apple does not offer enough liberties, use an Android phone" doesn't make any logical sense and everyone who uses your argument knows it, but chooses to continue making it to push an agenda.
Appropriate to remember the original use for this phrase was to describe him stealing ideas from engineers with no credit in a psychotic fashion and make scheduling realistic release dates impossible:
> he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it."
And
> He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.
Even then that's consensus on what the participants believe to be true (whether it's what they believed beforehand or not) - not a method of determining what is actually true.
There's not much you're missing. His videos try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and are relatively vapid. Sort of like the junk food of YouTube.
>accuse people of being mentally ill based on their sexuality or gender identity
But the question is, are trans people actually mentally ill objectively? It certainly doesn't help them reproduce (a form of survival) from a biological perspective, for example.
This Johns Hopkins professor thinks it's mental illness:
It’s nuanced. Something that appears to have been lost during the last years of trans hate.
> Like all DSM illnesses, one key component of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all of that, is that you have to be functionally impaired by it, otherwise it doesn’t count as a diagnosis
Many trans people fought to keep it in the DSM for the simple reason that health providers would have refused treatment if it was removed.
There are many trans people that have had treatment and live perfectly happy lives. What makes many trans people unhappy is society’s persistent persecution of them in politics and media.
> What makes many trans people unhappy is society’s persistent persecution of them in politics and media.
Then maybe they should have thought of that before advocating for males to invade women's spaces and for children to be medically harmed.
This so-called "persecution" is happening because boundaries need to be asserted. They abused the kindness and tolerance of others, and are now seeing the effects of this.
My point though is that if a person renders themselves unable to have offspring, especially before they have any, then from a purely biological perspective it's a form of illness. The same view would apply to all animals. If every member of a group acted the same way then the group would also die out. The functional impairment you mention includes the inability to attract a mate and reproduce. Hormones and sex reassignment surgery also severely hamper fertility.
Also trans people tend to have many other correlated mental issues and for example have high suicide attempt rates.
I don't think it's that strange. Most people are happy to have their views supported even if it's by means that they would call terrible if used against them.
There's "censorship" and (1) you can only read so much so you have to be selective and (2) there is a lot written by people who have an NMA (negative mental attitude) and it's a burden I can only take on for people I really care out.
If somebody is writing every day about how some class of people is responsible for their problems I just can't take it, and if I can't effectively block this crap with the tools they give me (20 or so rules on Mastodon, as opposed to Bluesky making me a decent feed out of the box, better with a little "less like this") I will move on.
I talked about how social media terms and service have become a middle man between social etiquette and laws in shaping social behaviour off and online on agora. Using social media feels closer to thinking than speaking sometimes, and anything that infringes on thought is dangerous.
It’s odd how so many people have developed the attitude of “censorship bad” without thinking about the consequences of removing it or whether “censorship” on private, profit-driven, opaque-algorithm-powered social media should even be considered bad.
I do think social media is bad. And ideally, no, to the extent that any social media sites have feeds more complicated than a chronological feed of people I follow, I want the algorithms powering those feeds to be open for inspection by anyone (by law), and for regulations to be put in place so that dangerous content is never promoted on the platform just because it attracts eyeballs (and thus advertising dollars). Opaque social media algorithms are bad for society, the same way that fentanyl is bad for society, or violent crime is bad for society.
There is no precedent in human history that you can compare social-media black-box algorithms to. It's not the same as a "public square," or a newspaper, or books, or talking to friends in person. It's a new paradigm.
I would drastically prefer regulations to letting the companies police themselves, but, well, waves hands at the current environment, and what Meta did removing their content reviewers is a step in the wrong direction. The platform will get worse as a result.
In other words, the problem is free reach, not free speech. You might have heard of it -- it has recently been popularized, co-opted, and slightly twisted by Twitter to mean what is more akin to "shadowbanning" problematic accounts, but I'm saying that no one deserves free reach by default on social media.
Because censorship isn't about censoring false information, its about silencing voices you disagree with. It's exactly why Trump got into power, because people feel like they are not being heard and the left is trampling all over them, despite the fact the left is the one spreading misinformation far more than the right.
It's odd that you think social media would be viable without it. There's a reason there are teams of Kenyan moderators getting PTSD from the sheer deluge of unimaginable horror which is regularly posted and filtered out.
Well actually, if they had used Next.js deployed via Vercel or something similar, it would have been statically cached on a CDN and prevents issues like this. But because they want to use older technology that's more difficult to cache and proxy, this happens.
God, this reminds me of the worst sort of discussions I’ve had with people who don’t understand the technologies they are working with. I’m sorry for being so negative, but “older technology that's more difficult to cache and proxy” is just nonsense.
It's nonsense and worse: hype. I recently went through a bunch of Vercel apps and compared them to some of my favorite Rails/Django apps. The best performing Vercel apps were on par at best.
Honest question: Where do you deploy? What do you use for queues? Database? It's impossible to beat React for component libraries but, lemme tell you, I've struggled to be productive with Next when compared to Rails.
I don't know if I'd admit that publicly, without first reading about it and trying to understand why things like RoR and Python have huge, loyal user bases.
I'm sure they meant an actual statically typed language. I agree that dynamic languages are fun and productive ... until the codebase becomes big and complex, and then not knowing what shape any data is quickly becomes a nightmare to understand and debug.
