There's another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?
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I could live without all the news and stuff, and I do just ignore it when it gets too much. The ability to communicate with other people across the entire world however is something I really appreciate.
Sounds great, but completely unrealistic. People have almost universally embraced social media because we're social animals. How would it disappear, short of an outright global ban?
I do love to crank ma hog with my bröthers, arooooo
Sometimes when it gets overwhelming I don't do any news or social media at all for a few weeks. It seems to help my mental health, particularly when every bit of news suggests that everything is going to shit.
when you stick your hand on a hot stove and feel pain, it's so you know to do something about it. you don't want to shut that off.
Yeah that's a fair point. Thing is, I don't know what to do about this shit (Gestures to world). I used to get involved in a lot of direct action when I was younger but I'm a bit old for that now. And I can't really say that all the times I got battered by the police, arrested on airbases, shit like that - I'm not sure I made any difference at all. Some of those actions made headlines but those were mostly negative. And I know people say "Vote!" - but I do, and that doesn't seem to help either.
So yeah, sometimes I just don't use the stove for a while. I just feel a bit fuckin defeated.
Tech Broligarchy*
Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There's no way the majority of comments in the near future won't just be LLMs.
Decentralized authentication system that support pseudonymous handles. The authentication system would have optional verification levels.
So I wouldn't know who you are but I would know that you have verified against some form of id.
The next step would then by attributes one of which is your real name but also country of birth, race, gender, and other non-mutable attributes that can be used but not polled.
So I could post that I am Bob living in Arizona and I was born in Nepal and those would be tagged as verified, but someone couldn't reverse that and request if I want to post without revealing those bits of data.