Video games

I would find this more plausible to believe if the NDP didn’t presently hold a majority government in BC.

This sounds like fun. How did it go?

On the left are the 5 classical Chinese elements. On the right are characters made by combining the elements, but they’re mostly gibberish as far as I know.

Well I think we shouldn’t ban talking to other people in general. In my mind the harmful effects of social media is not what comes from chatting with specific people you are friends with.

Oh sorry, I mean, I think we should ban algorithmic feeds (by which I mean anything non-trivial – they usually have “latest unreads” etc. which is fine by me.). Possibly also systems which are both (a) not dedicated to a single topic, and (b) connect at least hundreds of thousands of people, and © have some built-in mechanism to facilitate forwarding content from others to other people directly adjacent to you on the graph (retweeting/reblogging/etc.).

SMS, IRC, BBS, online chat – these all predate what are known as social media and they fit all my desiderata. No non-trivial algorithmic feed, and segregated into generally smaller communities.

Bluesky, twitter (latest-from-friends), Mastodon – I am skeptical of these, even if they have no non-trivial algorithmic feeds. While individuals will typically have less than ten thousand “friends”/“following” per se, the friend graph still forms a network which comprises millions of people. Of course, traditional systems like email are similar, so this would probably be okay if not for reblogging/retweeting/etc., which is basically a human-powered recommender system.

Twitter (under normal usage), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, tumblr – hard no, these fit none of the desiderata, and I think they’re clearly “social media” and also clearly harmful.

YouTube and Reddit I think are acceptable if we ban the non-trivial feeds (i.e. restrict to subscriptions-only, no recommender systems, no “best”, “hot”, etc.)

Well I don’t see why we would need to ban online chat for kids. That’s not social media in my mind; there’s no algorithmic feed.

This might discourage politicians from trampling on young people’s rights.

Most of the social media bans I’ve seen have been for those under the age of 16.

can you give some examples of things that would count as world news to you? I would think world news is stuff that affects everyone throughout the world. U.S. politics affects everyone quite a bit.

right but what about the other stuff i said

A long-term losing strategy, yet short term it normally reliably drums up support in the kind of range that can tip an election. Quite eye-opening to me that an election can still be won with far-from-center politics.

After all, NYC is not part of the world.

Oddly enough, the NYPD have offices internationally, in Qarar, Israel, Colombia, Germany, and numerous other countries. Also, the New York health department is the one that cracked open the case on lead contamination in turmeric farming in Bangladesh. It’s probably one of the most international cities, for whatever that means.