Itās been nearly a year since Instagram and Threads defaulted toĀ blocking recommendations of āpoliticalā contentĀ from accounts you donāt already follow, butĀ now Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says, āā¦weāre going to be adding political content to recommendationsā on both platforms.
Thatās a sharp turn fromĀ his statements in 2023laying out the goal of a āless angry place for conversationsā that wouldnāt do anything to encourage politics or hard news. However, under Metaās new approach to moderation ā and new rules aboutĀ what users can say on its platformsā that goal is going out the window just as the Trump administration prepares to take over.
Until now, users have had to opt-in to seeing recommendations of content deemed political, but the change rolling out this week in the US and to the rest of the world next week will turn on the recommendations and a content control setting available with options for less, standard (the default setting), and more.
In a series of Threads posts, MosseriĀ reiterated, āIāve maintained very publicly and for a long time that it not our place to show people political content from accounts they donāt follow,ā and that āitās proven impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content.ā
In aĀ video on Instagram,Ā he said that the push for political content ā particularly from users on Threads ā is āby the way, very different from the feedback we were getting only a few years ago about people feeling that they were overly exposed to political content on our platforms.ā Of course, according to theĀ Wall Street Journal, that was before Mark Zuckerberg experienced the effects of filters cutting down the reach of his post about recovering from a torn ACL and before Metaās new and friendlier-to-Trump policy chief took over.
Well, guys, the internet was a good idea while it lasted. A fun experiment. Shame itās gonna take the rest of modern society along with it.
Can we just go back to anonymously calling each other insensitive names while playing video games with triple-digit ping times? Any era after that was just the downfall.
āIt wasnāt supposed to be this way! It was supposed to be a thing of beauty, not this abomination!ā
4chan is still there. itās old. itās anonymous. itās full of trolls. just sayan.
That was the Internet. People using only AOL or something (Iām born in 1996, so not sure) would apparently not be called Internet users.
Itās the same with Facebook and co now, except they squatted on our free communication space. So they managed to pretend thereās nothing else in the Internet.
Can still have the old thing. Things needed for everyone to use it as intended - hosting and connectivity and naming and authentication solutions. Hosting and connectivity - no-configuration distributed storage of data from your webpage or whatever, solutions to NAT traversal not requiring user configuration (think old Skype). Naming - thatās centralization by definition, but still points of failure can be limited to names signed by some identity provider that doesnāt have to be online. Authentication - thatāll have to be cryptographic identities, so whatās lost is lost. But one can make a convenient for the user āinheritanceā operation, of grabbing everything signed by a certain identity to clone it (while obviously a new identity, can be used in case of losing the old one).
I guess somebody would have already done this.
80ās kid hereā¦
We cannot go back to anonymous users calling each other names. People went way too far down the āmy feelings are hurt and youāre going to jailā path. Thereās no going back to āif you donāt like it go somewhere elseā like it used to be.
There is, it just has to be more convenient, hence the listed functionality.
Thereās Fediverse. Thereās federated or selfhostable messaging. Thereās a multitude of selfhostable solutions for everything. There are peopleās personal websites. It just cannot be killed off by its very nature.
Not good enough due to fragmentation and amount of steps. Attention economy, remember. No attention resource to bother with something manual for a specific person.