You’re right in that I said something wrong. There will be a revolution, but one that will only happen when human labor has no value. Until them, communism is not possible and it will simply become oligarchy with rampant poverty and technological stagnation while massive government inefficiency and corruption are rampant. There is very little wealth inequality if everyone except dear leader and his generals are rich, everyone else is equally poor. There might be huge wealth disparities in the US right now but the average homeless person has a higher quality of life than almost every other country in the world, this is only possible because capitalism has allowed for the quality of life of everyone to improve as it generates wealth.

The Chinese are the only ones that actually “get it” I think, or so it would seem, even if they are still somewhat adhering to tankie tendencies.

I really don’t think it makes any sense to consider tech billionaires automating labor as “real Marxists” but those studying Marxism and building Socialism as “fake.”

And yet they and their employees are the only ones capable of creating the conditions for communism to be real and viable. I will reinstate my point and urge you to meditate on it: Communism will not be viable until human labor has no value.

Removed by mod

I don’t have anything against communists. Stalinist tankies are not communists.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Ah well I’m just parroting what I’ve read. I’m only superficially familiar with most tech stuff. I do know that the ban at least applies to the device, email and ip address for sure.

Doesnt work. They ban your ip, MAC address, email, everything. They even have a tool that flags people that may be doing ban evasion based on behavior and communities that are joined by said account. You could get around it but it’s way too much effort just to use reddit.

I would prefer if it grew because so many communities are dead. It seems that only political and shitposting instances have constant activity.

For me it’s still not a real Reddit alternative. Which sucks because I’m permabanned from Reddit.

I think trying to force communism is bad. Communism in my mind is inevitable, but we’re no there yet. Only when human labor is worthless and capitalism crumbles under its own weight will communism finally be viable and good.

Through the discussion I’ve had here I can see that I should have been more specific and defined what kind of algorithm is the problem. But that was the point of making the post in the first place, to understand why the narrative is not moving in that direction and now I can see why, it’s nuanced discussion. But I think it’s well worth it to steer it in that direction.

Exactly my point. In lemmy I can still see all the posts, Meta’s algorithm will remove stuff from the feeds and push others and even hide comments. It is literally a reality warping engine.

I dunno, old forums were fun as fuck and they had no algorithm beyond sorting by most popular, new etc. Hey if it makes people spend less time looking at their phone it is still a win in my book— I type as I spend hours on my tablet. I’m a hypocrite, won’t lie.

I think the point of that article is closer to my own argument than what I myself would have thought. I do still think that the problem is the design of the algorithm: a simple algorithm that just sorts content is not a problem. One that decides what to omit and what to push based on what it thinks will make me spend more time on the platform is problematic and is the kind of algorithm we should ban. So maybe the premise is, algorithms designed to make people spend more time on social media should be banned.

Engaging with another idea in there I absolutely think that people should be able to say that Joe Biden is a lizard person and have that come up on everyone’s feed. Because ridiculous claims like that are easily shut down when everyone can see them and comment how fucking dumb it is. But when the message only makes the rounds around communities that are primed to believe that Joe Biden is a lizard person, the message gains credibility for them the more it is suppressed. We used to bring the Klu Klux Klan people on tv to embarrass themselves in front of all of America and it worked very very well, it’s a social sanity check. We no longer have this and now we have bubbles in every part of the political spectrum believing all kinds of oversimplifications, lies and propaganda.

The easy answer for me would be to ban algorithms that have the specific intent of maximizing user time spent on the app. I know that’s very hard to define legally. Maybe like I suggested below we can ban what kinds of signals algorithms can use to suggest and push content?

Like I said below I think the distinction is that a) I have access to a algorithm free feed here and b) lemmy (as far as I understand it) simply sorts content, rather than outright removing content from my feed if it thinks it will make me spend less time on it. I could be wrong about that second point though.

But correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not a programmer), lemmy’s algorithm is basically just sorting; it doesn’t choose over two pieces of media to show me but rather how it orders them. Facebook et al will simply not show content that I will not engage with or that will make me spend less time on the platform.

I agree that they are useful but at a certain point we as a society sometimes need to weight the usefulness of certain technologies against the potential for harm. If the potential for harm is greater than the benefit, then maybe we should somewhat curb the potential for that harm or remove it altogether.

So maybe we could refine the argument to be we need to limit what signals algorithms can use to push content? Or maybe that all social media users should have access to an algorithm free feed and that the algorithm driven feed be hidden by default and can be customizable by users?

While transparency would be helpful for discussion, I don’t think it would change or help with stopping propaganda, misinformation and outright bullshit from being disseminated to the masses because people just don’t care. Even if the algorithm was transparently made to push false narratives people would just shrug and keep using it. The average person doesn’t care about the who, what or why as long as they are entertained. But yes, transparency would be a good first step.