Heh, nice. Now do American corporations.
Haha I never downloaded chrome.
Now google spies on me only through maps, youtube, email, my friends’ email, and android. Also chromebooks if I am a highschooler.
Last one is compulsory. You can’t deny using google products if you wanna graduate child.
Your turn, Captain Noposts!
Can I just brag for a moment? I feel like I am among my people, and there is a little lesson at the end.
to calibrate: White dude in my 40s, nerdy by nature but non-technical in my education/employment
Twitter - signed up in the early 2000s when it first came out, pretty much stopped using by 2011
Facebook - signed up in the early 2000s when it first got big, pretty much stopped using by 2011, deleted my abandoned account last year
Google +, I’m sure I never signed up, but I had an account that I never used. Google being google negated me ever having to contemplate whether or not I would ever use it
Snapchat - never used
TikTok - never used
Instagram - never used
Are there others? I don’t know.
Reddit was the only “social media” I ever used for a sustained period of time and the only one where I felt part of any sort of community. I left reddit in June of 2023 when I made this account and I’ve never been back.
So, in many ways, I am successfully resisting/avoiding “the algorithm” and I am a good example of high media literacy with good resistance to manipulation by social media.
But, just to emphasize why community itself is so valuable and worthy of exploitation by techbros, here are life changes I’ve made since joining Lemmy, even without any algorithms or dark patterns. Not that Lemmy is strictly causal in all of these, but the relationship is there:
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I am now making my way through TNG, and am generally more Trek-literate
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Linux, natch
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Cancelled all streaming services (honestly most ‘subscription services’) in favor of a NAS running Plex (for now, will probably move to Jellyfin), Calibre, AudioBookshelf, Immich, Joplin, NextCloud, etc, etc, etc
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Now using Steam Deck as my daily driver for gaming
In other words, though I prize my independent thinking and avoidance of Big Cloud, and though I think all of these are positive changes representing a positive influence, I am clearly impressionable. And so are you.
Steam has an algorithm feeding you game suggestions
yeah and I gobble that shit up like candy.
I am not immune, and I don’t find all algorithms predatory - for example, I log on knowing that steam is selling me a product, but I am not the product. I just said in many ways I am successfully avoiding “the algorithm”, though the scare quotes immediately following a run down of social media networks was meant to indicate a specific type of algorithm that is meant to induce engagement or enragement (both are profitable) and change my behavior because I am the product.
I still have plenty of time for algorithms that serve me up games for that crucial 15% of my library that I bought but haven’t played yet.
One thing at a time Maxxie.
Fair enough :)
Got you beat. 40’s dude who’s never used any social media except for reddit (if that counts). I also have never used a smart phone.
Wow, I just read my own use bio. Exactly down to the T. Except still on OSX and I am using infuse instead of plex jelly fin. But all other use patterns are identical.
I’d say. I never posted on reddit though. Just a lurker. On lemmy, I post :)
I was once working for a company that wanted to post pictures online. They had the option to opt out, so there is no picture or a blurr or whatever. I was the only one who had no picture and they didn’t like that, they didn’t ecpect that anyone would check that mark. They pressured me to have that picture there. I didn’t even really care tbh, i just checked it because i could. They told me that i have puctures online anyway and it doesn’t matter. I told them that if they find a single picture of me online, they could use that. I have no social media, no pictures online and nothing. They were quite disappointed
“Now, you know it’s up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Or… well, like Brian, for example, has thirty seven pieces of flair, okay. And a terrific smile.”
I never even signed up for Twitter.
The modern internet makes me want to live in a cave and grow moss.
That isn’t an accident.
There is this insight that I remember reading about internet scams, that they are poor quality with lots of misspelling by design. According to what I’ve read, this acts as a useful filter: If you’re smart enough to pick up on things like misspellings, we don’t want to waste our time scamming you.
That is now essentially the entire ethos of the modern internet.
twitter early 2000s
2006 counts as early 2000s and not mid 2000s?
There is a lot of heated debate about this. They’re saying due to COVID, that “early” can mean anything from 0-8 now, which obviously I don’t understand but what can you do? They are saying it.
I must assume from your helpful correction that 2006 is the actual year twitter came out but even then I literally cannot be arsed to look that up on purpose because, I cannot stress this enough, I very much do not care about social media, as per my comment. So if you say 2006, that is what we’re going with.
There is a lot of heated debate about this. They’re saying due to COVID, that “early” can mean anything from 0-8 now
I would love to hear the logic behind that
Me too but, sadly: paywalled. That’s how they get you.
It seems like you got your taste of social media, decided you were essentially done with it and moved on.
I am just about in the same boat, I feel social media doesn’t offer me much that I value, and so I have been looking elsewhere.
My only use for social media is finding a $30 push mower or used TVs on marketplace.
Other than that, the content around most social media sites is mostly a slurry of bullshit mixed with Ai, so… waste of time, mostly.
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Teleporno: Tell me where is Godric? For I much desire to know his secrets.
tankies devestated
More like “keep your nazis”. The place is fucking infested and every report comes back with “no violation” for literal double lightning bolts and posting that one anti-semetic wojak.
haha yeah that’s stopping them
I like some of the content, but will not download the app either. I mostly just want to talk to other people anyway. The funny pictures and videos are just a bonus. That’s why I am here and not much else; this site is setup better for actually engaging with the users.
China a perfect communist motherland that doesn’t need anyones secrets!
Yes, I also live China and their all-seeing government.
I have a Xiaomi phone. They already know everything about me.
I mean I’d rather China know everything about me than America, since as an American citizen, America is a much bigger threat.
But lets be honest, whether I get an iphone, samsung, or huawei, both countries are going to have all my data.
Facts
My gf had xiaomi once. Had to visit the doctors a lot before it cleared up.
Haha this joke is funny because foreigners have funny words and sound stupid
Ayyyy!
You could change ROM. Then the software wouldn’t spy on you anymore
I could, but how phones work with respect to PCs has always seemed very complicated to me and I don’t want to screw up my phone.
Understandable tbh. Depending on your phone, there are chances it’s actually fairly easy to change ROMs, you could also try stuff out on an older device of yours or your family’s
Tell me, did I have a fever dream about this or does Xiaomi actually have ads in their settings and system apps?
It isn’t a dream, more like a nightmare.
I mean, they can be disabled, but it is pain in the ass to do so.
China doesn’t need TikTok to get your data. They can just buy it from data brokers, lol.
Or sell you ads AND not have to pay for it, while also influencing us algorithmically directly. If that’s even the case, that is, which, who even fucking knows anymore. And I’m not even sure we needed tiktok to be pissed at wrongdoings everywhere, including Chinese government wrongdoings. Honestly, tiktok’s algorithm is better than basically any other algorithmic app right now, save for the fact that it obviously is getting very up to date information through my phone somehow.
I wonder what the proportional value is of all the actionable data that’s ever been extracted from date lakes versus the cost of gathering it all. Probably not even as good as people think given the difficulty of evaluating that as a metric.
Value enough for billions and billions of dollars industries to develope apparently
TikTokChinaTeleMessage Israel or anyone really
I already get the same thing from the YouTube app which won’t shut the fuck up about Shorts
Uninstalling that app was a game changer…so much better on browser with unblock origin running.
Fr if something works in browser I will never use the app.
Some exceptions for things which require better encryption.
Uuuuuse a foss youtube frontend wooooooo like freetube or pipepipe woooooooooo…
(Insert other ghostly noises)
Pipepipe for life. By far the best YouTube experience around.
I don’t get Shorts. I can’t watch them on my PlayStation, if I click on one on the phone app it’ll disconnect the PlayStation and force me to watch it on my phone.
If you try to upload a video that is less than a minute long, it forces you to do Shorts.
I also don’t get why opening up a community thread or something pauses the video I’m watching on the PlayStation.
I’ve also noticed lately that when I connect the phone app with the PlayStation, about 30% of the time, the video will play extremely slow without sound. I have to close and reboot the YouTube app on the PlayStation to watch anything afterwards.
Sounds like a bunch of shit if you ask me!
YouTube shorts are fantastic. You have to be into misogyny though.
I sign out to view shorts, clear site data, then manually search a couple of “seed” videos I like to get the algorithm picking out new stuff.
It won’t even show you anything unless you have some viewing history. It’s just straight up broken for people who have had accounts for many years.
Lol that’s close to what I do. It used to show you videos based on your likes and subs even with eatch history off but now they will refuse.
So I just temporarily turned on history, watch some seeds, then turn it off again, and voila, it suggests based on likes and subs just like before.
My shorts are just cats and dogs acting silly and the rare REPO clip…
Interesting. All it shows me are cats, hair cut/dying, coffee, animals being silly, and comedic videos.
Mine was all this anti-women stuff, so I closed it and never looked back.
Did you enable saving history, custom recommendations…?
Log into YouTube on incognito mode
The terrible shit will he there, I saw it for the first time in a while after testing sound on live fedora before installing it on dual boot
So YouTube can see if you’re wearing a fedora & if you are, it shows you a grip of “alpha male” videos?
Check out revanced.app. You’re welcome.
I mean, I have it installed, but I have it installed in a “sandbox” (Co-opting androids work profile feature) I use Insular
But looking now, it seems it hasn’t been updated in a year so I might have to look for an alternative soon if it has issues when I upgrade to Android 16 lol
Look into Shelter, it works on latest Android though it’s been several months since the last update.
Big brain move, let’s make them buy our data from someone else. 🙌
