lonelyislet

that the Winklevoss twins are held in such low regard

(btw it says a lot about Hacker News, the kind of VC infested mind that dwells there)

I don't know the entire history and who knows if ConnectU would've succeeded or not (for various definitions of success)

But like, Zuck does all these shady things and somehow it's their fault? They meet Larry Summers (who's since been implicated in Epstein and apparently financial fraud) in suits and they get called "assholes"? Well, here's the lesson for life, everyone: fuck over whoever you want and you're sure to win

Caring about money and shareholder returns is good

We'd all like to live in a world where money is no object but we don't live in that world

I get you have a Hard Job

However just bear in mind that when you alienate users and push them away after one too many braindead decisions you're ultimately going to _lose_ money and whatever goodwill in the process

(Of course, switching costs are high, that's the point, trap people)

Keep in mind also that a lot of your "earning value" seems like fraud in a lot of cases

Be careful you don't become yet another white collar person that ends up in a jail cell, because at least half of you are headed that way

Now, give us back the fucking products we grew up with and enjoyed, before you all ruined them

Thanks

Facebook is run by a sociopath regardless of political orientation

Google and Youtube censor everything

Elon freed the world from covid censorship but apparently the site still bans a whole lot of people and crashes constantly

You can't fucking use ANYTHING

Be better?

Not that that's easy when the VCs that fund the companies are like Marc Andreessen, whose worldview seems to be limited to "Edward Snowden is a traitor" (in fact he put it even better than that, "if you look in the dictionary under traitor there's a picture of Edward Snowden")

Fuck all of you, you all deserve prison time

is not your friend

The technology needs to exist to be able to find stuff based on keywords and "Hey I'm looking for such and such but can't remember exactly how to find it" (LLMs might be helpful here)

But for the former Google completely stopped catering to that and more to the point they absolutely love censorship

They're such an offensive company

I don't want to be coddled, you fucking idiots

I don't want you removing covid "misinformation" subreddits like nonewnormal

Or you banning people from r/politics who don't operate according to your narratives

Or you quarantining subreddits

Management is totally fucking corrupt and criminal

But these days, of course, EVERY platform fucking sucks, for varying reasons, maybe I'll make another post about that

Oh - and New Reddit sucks. You intentionally broke old.reddit.com

All of you fucking fail upwards. You should be fired. You should be unemployed and unemployable

It's actually kind of terrifying how much power some VCs have or at least how involved in so many companies they are

When Andreessen calls Snowden "a traitor" it gives you the ammunition you need by which to judge his worldviews

Is all of Silicon Valley like that? No, but why are our companies made by people like that and not some of the EFF (https://www.eff.org/) folks?

Hi it's been a while

It's sad that we have to do this (years of neglect, botched evolution of combat, storylines that make no sense in that the player can interact with characters they shouldn't know yet) but OSRS is a very legitimate game

I like how you earn your unlocks. Run energy kind of sucks, but it makes sense, the game is cohesive

Quests are hard requirements. To unlock Canifis you have to actually kill the temple guardian. And so on

And honestly the game is *hard*. Runescape always was. What RS3 does is to take an existing skeletal structure and bootstrap things onto it to make it trivial (like removing the challenge from Dungeoneering bosses etc)

Of course I understand the point of RS3 might be to get to the endgame. That's fine. (And I wouldn't even mind the gods coming back a la 6th age in RS3, as long as it's done cohesively) But OSRS just feels like they do things a little better

(OSRS is also not a game frozen in time. The game actively does get meaningful updates, new areas added)

Web 1.0 (so to say) encountered a bubble; I don't know much of that history but I do know at some point the bubble collapsed and people suffered because of it. This was around 1999?

It brings to mind the question of valuation, how much something is actually worth, given the relative market for it

My contention is not only is Facebook a parasitic bloodsucker but it ruins the rest of the internet

If they have fake acocunts (as Aaron Greenspan contends) they do nothing about, if they autoplay videos and count that as "views", if they do nothing to combat spam and fraud (Marketplace etc), and all sorts of other things I could mention, not only is it a shit product but it leads to people trying to copy their business model and falling on their face because it's all based on fraud

Collegehumor apparently shut down because of the video fraud

I am no fan of Google, but what if their behavior was shaped by the need to compete with Facebook? People liked Google+ a lot even despite the coercive tactics, and did they have to do that to compete with Facebook's act first, apologize later ethos (in which they constantly change the privacy settings)? Perhaps. What if their acquisition of Doubleclick for example was to compete in the market THEY imagined existing for advertising?

There's real value to something like Facebook but there isn't much point to using it (your shadow profile aside) because it's horribly broken and Zuckerberg steals everything from everyone else (Snapchat). I don't blame the Winklevosses for being angry. They apparently came up with .edu onboarding. Zuck presumably steals not just ideas, but concretely, code.

He is a terrible person who should be in jail for various abuses of some form of computer fraud and abuse acts

But what if the entire ecosystem is affected by it? Then you're not just "not using Facebook" and so not affected (again, aside from shadow profiles, or being tagged in photos after the privacy settings reset, or receiving messages they don't show you so you have to log in) - the entire rest of the internet decided to copy their "highly successful business model". What if it's literally all based on fraud?

Or maybe this is just an anti-Reddit thing

See, the problem with reddit is you can't actually be yourself (obviously within the confines of not acting like a bigoted asshole) because politically motivated mods will ban you

Certain topics are completely off the table, like how the covid shots are responsible for millions of deaths (not allowed on Youtube either, by the way; methinks all these tech execs should spend a long time in a small cell) or how conservative-leaning folks might just be ok (or how "the vast consensus is that anthropogenic climate change is a real and serious thing" in spite of actual evidence by real scientists)

Reddit for being ostentibly decentralized is in fact very very centralized

All the platforms seem to be dying anyway, Youtube (see above) is useless and you can't compete with them regardless as that scale, Reddit - Facebook's Zuckerberg may be marginally better about some things but even he's just so incredibly unlikeable

No, not ACTUALLY tied of news

I get emails from Just The News and they do a decent job, if a little excessively American centric (you will get important stories like "50 dead in flood in Thailand" but you'll also get 5 stories of "judge blocks Trump initiative")

But in part it's a twofold thing, I'm tired of waiting for The Next Big Event (read: terrorism), waking up to news of "plane hits one world trade in new york" (I don't think it will happen again and it's silly to prepare for such a story but maybe as someone who grew up on 9/11 it's seared into my consciousness). I don't like "waiting" for the news, and I also don't, I think, always like being connected, plugged in

But the main reason I'm "tired of news" is because of The Algorithms

For those wishing to avoid Facebook and its broken-ass site and dubious mission objectives (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122) then Youtube is marginally better, with the home page being a mix of things you genuinely do want to see mixed in with things you've already seen and things it thinks you'll like

Of course, pure news things are always available, but I go on Youtube a lot, even by force of habit. And it's had terrible recommendations for years

Maybe in the pit of my soul I do prefer, as stated earlier, not always being connected. It's nice to get emails of news and leave it at that