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DuckAI, What is Faine whining about now?

It freaks me out every time. I need nice sedate photos and interesting text and videos I can click on if I feel like it

ok now i'm done

The fortitude to engage in curiosity outside social media is really about our ability to chart our own paths regardless of what the greater world finds novel. That social litigation and curiosity should not be tandem partners for a young mind.

I'm so old I've rabbit-holed in a paper dictionary.

The problem I think Faine is identifying is, like, you want to listen to music, you open up Apple Music, which isn't the wrong app for your goal, and then you're just staring at it going "what *do* I want to listen to?" because you're out of practice at picking what gets played to you.

Part of it is that people often have aspirational preferences that don't always match their revealed preferences. Until recently, resisting the temptation to indulge the latter so one could focus on the former was a sign of virtue and discipline. Now it's "proof" people can't be trusted to choose.

Also: i can make up my own damn mind

So actually yes, we have studies showing that eg you can clicker train yourself even though you are fully aware of what you're doing. Eating a piece of a favorite candy after completing a task (or a step of it) makes you more likely to do the task in the future even though you know what's going on.

Gundam Kit Skinner Box is a good username

i feel like this too contributes to the erosion of hobbies as well. why discover something that you have a genuine interest in and can build skills in when the algo is designed to placate that as much as possible

That's...right? That's right.

well read "Gridiron" from Philipp Kerr - this is what happens when we give tech control over things

no. I don't really feel like talking today

The all compassing theme of current affairs is 'removal of agency' not just the web, but any expression of self-agency and free will IMO the main reason the trans community is now targeted, bodily autonomy is the epitome of self-agency Same for the way they try to age-gate the web

I 100% agree. Every search is a chance to confront a blinking cursor. But pre-social media plugins like stumbleupon were crucial to explore the ‘what if’s’ of the internet

you can get 100 bucks toward your first Kalshi bet on Pascal’s Wager with code TOHELLWITHIT100 today!

curiosity is important but easily stifled

I will say that sometimes I get sucked into searches that I never thought would exist and I suddenly WANT to know why Gwyneth Paltrow dumped Brad Pitt.

the search for pixel peril continues. Also the implicit notion that current historical stretch is anomalously {bad} {mad} seems grotesquely ahistorical. People sent to jail over "satanic reetooal aboos" are still alive! UK still has laws against "subliminal ads" on the books!

I turn off all autoplay and it helps a little

agree mostly between outrage cycles and declining media literacy, i feel like auto-playing algorithms have made the internet a worse place to navigate

they got tired and then embarrassed faced with their favorite porn/shopping terms every single day, & thought gawd maybe the machine would know better

when we are presented with options we limit our thinking to those options more often than if we aren’t told the options and figure them out. That’s the prevailing Titanic sinking theory currently. Once they had more detailed images the truth became known iirc only 1 person had theorized the reality

Oh but now we have the AI box, which is the closest we've come yet to the Krell machine.