I'm now one of those people, the ones talking about how they dropped FB.
Eventually I logged on and noticed that as I was scrolling, like 2/3rds of the content wasn't from my friends at all, not even re-shared stuff, it was all ads or shorts from randos or random group pages that somehow appeared on my feed. And of course a lot of the things from my friends were, in fact, re-shares.
I felt like, if only like 20% or less of the content is original stuff from my friends, what's the point of even being here? This is terrible. So I gave up.
When I look at Facebook now, I immediately click Feeds > Friends. It's not 100% perfect, but so so much better. And I see what I "need" with so much less wasted time.
Going with more efficient contractors make sense, but just saying "we'll make our bases more efficient and do more with less" is easy to say and hard to do.
I'm sure a lot of European countries were trying to do more with less when they embraced the 90s peace dividend, and then what we saw when Russia invaded Ukraine and everyone was checking out the state of their armies, was that mostly they had just done less with less.
The counter-point to that is that Russia has continued to spend a lot on their military and yet wasn't able to steamroll Ukraine at all, so maybe the US is also spending more to get less.
Not doing less with less doesn't mean you are doing more with more.
Russia's problem was they thought they were spending a lot on their military, but they were really enriching their top military brass while their ancient gear mostly rotted.
Back on topic, however, this is what I'm talking about[1]:
> The radical-patriotic television channel Tsargrad indignantly reported that “the actual scale of corruption under [former Defense Minister Sergey] Shoigu was not in the millions but in the trillions of rubles that officials dishonorably stole from the Russian Army.”
I don't disagree that Russia might not be spending their military money effectively (including with copious corruption), but that really has no bearing on whether the US is spending their money effectively, which as far as I can tell we are not. I brought up Russia merely as an example that spending money does not mean your military is more capable.
Do you think they have a future? I love the idea of a watch I can write simple little apps on. I looked at garmin, it was more challenging. the apple watch just has such a short battery life, I can't stand to charge it so much
Agreed, had a bunch of talks about this issue with the wife.
On one hand, we're both distractible people, and it'd probably be better if we could leave our phones behind on certain family outings and trips.
But on the other hand, there's definitely times where you really need your phone on said outings: for directions, for business info, to call people, to book things, etc. It's just hard to get the necessities without bringing along everything else.
> For example, which part of the Apple II was predatory?
How about the price?
A quick googling suggests that it cost ~6,500 USD (in today's money) to buy an Apple II when it launched. Obviously it was a different time, but that sort of price today would likely be called predatory by at least some people.
> As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held.
These sorts of bad faith comments are so tiresome to read.
We all know that if the foreign country in question was Japan or France then nobody would really give a shit. Even a more neutral country like India or Brazil would likely be completely fine. It's specifically an issue because China is a geopolitical opponent of the US that we're engaged in a sort of new cold war with.
Not to mention, China blocks basically every popular social media site from the US already, and a bunch of other websites and apps besides. Tit-for-tat is very common in trade, you can't expect other countries to leave your foreign ventures untouched if you heavily restrict theirs.
Is your argument seriously, "yeah but if the US doesn't ban things as hard as China, it doesn't count"?
Personally I'd love for the US to ban or restrict more things from China. Not because that's the end state I want, but maybe it'd get China to loosen restrictions so that we'd get closer to parity.
No. My point is that the US is hypocritical about this. Every excuse is found to not call this protectionism. It is protectionism, period.
If Huawei smartphones are a national security threat that justifies a ban, then Xiaomi smartphones are as well. But those are not banned. Why? Because the ban is more for protectionism than for security reasons. Just own it, that's fine.
> Every excuse is found to not call this protectionism. It is protectionism, period.
Agreed, it's a trade issue. And anyone who's been paying even a hint of attention to trade knows that China is WAY more protectionist about foreign companies than the US is.
Reciprocity is or should be part of trade. There is nothing hypocritical about responding to trade restrictions with trade restrictions, any more than responding to an invasion with your own military force is "hypocritical".
> There is nothing hypocritical about responding to trade restrictions with trade restrictions
That's right, but that's not what I said. I keep having to explain it so I'll do it again: what feels hypocritical is that the US don't call those bans trade issues. They call them "national security". If you keep saying "we're the land of the free, China is bad because of their protectionism" and then you do protectionism and say "no no no, we are not doing protectionism, it's national security", then it is hypocritical.
Would love to see parity in these sorts of trade restrictions between the US and China. Me personally, then I'd have zero problems with TikTok being PRC-owned.
As it stands, foreign businesses operating in China are much more constrained, and laws they must comply with are enormously more invasive (e.g. censorship) than going the other way.
Those laws also apply to Chinese companies operating in China too. They have different stuff for outside of China. For example, TikTok's algorithm which is the general use one is AFAIK banned in China.
For those that disagree with the above: Reciprocity is an important part of trade. China is making these choices, and the US is just putting things on a level playing field.
That's the opposite of a principled stand (cicero is rolling in his grave over your use of his name to say this). It was, and is, boo hoo so terrible when the prc forces American companies to engage in forced sales, hand over the crown jewel IPs to local partners and "request" 50% ownership for the govt.
> It was, and is, boo hoo so terrible when the prc forces American companies to engage in forced sales
Reciprocity is a standard part of trade. If you come down on foreign businesses in your country, don't be surprised when the same thing happens to your businesses in other countries.
When Trump threatens tariffs, other countries threaten to respond in kind. That's how trade basically always works. There's a reason why free trade deals focus on reducing restrictions going both ways.
Because no one's actually going to Mastodon. It's really that simple.
If you wanna delve into the details of why people so often avoid the platforms that FOSS enthusiasts tend to recommend, that's an interesting question, but we gotta be clear here, we already knows who's successful and who's not.
People one go where the technologically literate tell them go. If it wasn't for me, my family and friends wouldn't have gone on iOS, WhatsApp, Signal, you name it. If we give the thumbs up they know it's not bad if they migrate. Of course they can still decide against something if they don't see the value, but we can have significant impact on what platforms they use or not.
> People one go where the technologically literate tell them go.
No they don't. If this was true, my wife's family would be on Telegram or Discord, haha. We actually did go into Telegram briefly, but they all dropped out. What got them to switch from SMS to WhatsApp was her parents temporarily moving to Austria.
What videocall service other than Discord lets a normal user individually adjust other call participants' relative volume or even mute them? Because for me, that's the killer feature.
You're conflating trade and speech, just like every other PRC defender here.
The exact same content on TikTok could be replicated by another company coming from some other country and it would be totally fine and unbannable. Which means it's not actually about speech.
Why does who runs the app matter? Stopping someone from saying something is still silencing them, even if someone else saying it would be okay.
This is just setting the groundwork for the government controlling social media even more than it already does, because they know how influential it is.
I'm not defending the PRC in the slightest. I fundamentally disagree with the government forcing a sale of a company due to its social media app. This is different from every other example of banning PRC-backed companies (ex: Huawei, TP-LINK, etc) because there is genuinely a plausible argument for natsec. With TikTok there just is no such argument, other than the video content being controlled by a foreign hostile entity. And I just fail to be convinced that that's enough to ban it. Do we ban Russia Today?
When it crosses international borders? I'm sorry, but duh?
Do you think websites and apps somehow aren't trade? I'd love to hear your reasons for internationally used online services not counting as trade somehow, that's gonna be fascinating.
I think that considering TikTok's shop feature, it would be, but to me the dictionary definition of "the business of buying and selling commodities, products, or services; commerce" wouldn't apply to a free social media app otherwise. It lacks the critical transactional nature.
I guess it would be a form of countertrade of attention for content. Nonetheless I don't think a "trade" of social media content and ads should be something that is within the government's scope to ban. If TikTok was made ad-free, would that change your argument?
That you don't consider it trade is irrelevant. It is trade, and trade has always been within the scope of the government -- every government, really -- to regulate.
> If TikTok was made ad-free, would that change your argument?
I think as long as TikTok is generating revenue -- or even plans to in the future, as sometimes happens for startups -- it'd count as trade yeah.
Eventually I logged on and noticed that as I was scrolling, like 2/3rds of the content wasn't from my friends at all, not even re-shared stuff, it was all ads or shorts from randos or random group pages that somehow appeared on my feed. And of course a lot of the things from my friends were, in fact, re-shares.
I felt like, if only like 20% or less of the content is original stuff from my friends, what's the point of even being here? This is terrible. So I gave up.