We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.

Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.

But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.

The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.

We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.

And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.

I’d rather ask the Amish how can we fix the internet than a bunch of Bay Area VCs and FAANG employees.

Not all problems have technical solutions.

We need a national conversation (which we seem to be having) about the corrosive nature of these algos.

I personally think they should be liable for much more than they are under section 230.