you are right - it doesn’t have to be one or the other… I just assume that for social media to work as I expect I don’t know most of the people on the platform. given that assumption and the lowering price of creating bots and ability to onboard them I expect that eventually most of the actors on the platform will end up being bots. people that write them are often insanely motivated (politically or financially) and creating barriers for them is not easy.
I was thinking about something like this but I think it’s ultimately not enough. You have essentially just two possible ends stages for this:
you only trust people that you personally meet and you verified their private key directly and then you will see only posts/interactions from like 15 people. the social media looses its meaning and you can just have a chat group on signal.
you allow some length of chains (you trust people [that are trusted by the people]^n that you know) but if you include enough people for social media to make sense then you will eventually end up with someone poisoning your network by trusting a bot (which can trust other bots…) so that wouldn’t work unless you keep doing moderation similar as now.
i would be willing to buy a wearable physical device (like a yubikey) that could be connected to my computer via a bluetooth interface and act as a fido2 second factor needed for every post but instead of having just a button (like on the yubikey) it would only work if monitoring of my heat rate or brainwaves would check out.
but there is just no right or wrong answer to every question… sometimes it’s just about opinion.
sometimes these questions are trivial (which color of tie should I wear with this shirt) and sometimes they are literally life and death questions (should death penalty be legal)… and there will always be people with opposing opinions on them. “agreeing to disagree” is literally the best possible thing they can do to live in the same society.
I think I get the sentiment that you are angry at but there is nothing wrong with that statement. It just doesn’t mean “whelp, there must be some higher purpose those things are serving that we don’t see” and is more like “there are some awful people doing bad things” or “they just were living in a seismic area” or “they had some genes not compatible with their survival”… There are always reasons. Not satisfying or purpose fulfilling reasons, just reasons.
it’s on youtube
imagine Shakespeare tragedy where everyone dies but as a narrated documentary. it’s freaking depressing…
I understand your points and agree with them. For me the experience with support has been quite opposite though… I can always find a solution (or at least an explanation) with Linux (I can go all the way down the rabbit hole to the source code if I would be so inclined) but with Windows it’s always been just black magic rituals or random software from the internets that either work or tough luck.
You could also say the employees choose to work for the company that’s not paying them enough. Of course they have constraints in how many jobs there are and how many other job seekers exist and which jobs they are qualified for… but then the problem complexity explodes to “how do we build a fair society” very quickly.
The only people that keep doing what they were doing when I call behind them on my bike are the ones that are walking in a group side by side blocking the entire width of the pathway…
that is an interesting idea. still… you can create an account (or have a troll farm of such accounts) that will mainly be used to trust bots and when their reputation goes down you throw them away and create new ones. same as you would do with traditional troll accounts… you made it one step more complicated but since the cost of creating bot accounts is essentially zero it doesn’t help much.