This is also pretty common. People tend to think like that about everything they had in their formative years.
It’s nostalgia plus a realization of how entrenched tech bureocratic processes have penetrated their lives, oftentimes making them worse, not better (many of the improvements are taken for granted).
But my point is you can take this “old times were better” in most of every case when doing these surveys. About music, TV and everything.
What people really want are the benefits without some of the cons that they’ve very willingly accepted out of laziness and/or ignorance.
They’ve lost a ton of privacy and rights and ability to discourse and act by being so heavily surveilled and “panopticon’d” into superficial uniformity of opinion.
Many of the things they complain about they can still do “non tech/non online” but it requires more effort than pretending that there should be just one way so they don’t have to choose.
The solution is the same as with the current shitty clickbait of today, ignore it.
If they automate shovelling useless crap (which they’ve already done quite a bit without the likes of chatgpt) then it’s on the user to say “I’m not just gonna consume your crap, I’ll go elsewhere with my views, which are your success metric, in aggregate”
What would you legislate here? The publication clearly doesn’t care about quality and paying some people to fill shitty, already pre programmed templates and using something like chatGPT seems like the same style of crap.
They were definitely not a safe source of labor.
Also, I’d caution against reactive takes of “legislation” when the politicians who can legislate usually don’t understand the technologies and are simply trying to bundle stuff in for their lobbyist (who funds them) benefit. The same types who “want to ban encryption” or other myopic takes.
Stronger rights and guarantees around imbalances of power (not specifically related to tech either) would work much better than just reacting to an AI scare.
This is definitely a great post. The only thing that I think would help also would be discoverability and user choice, but it’s obviously easy to say without working on it.
Reddit had relatively consistent discoverability, but the whole “federation” aspect (which is the whole point) makes a very different landscape to wade through.
Definitely, this is a milestone for a new wave of “early adopters”. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
The problem is that Lemmy is being mentioned in hackernews reddit and elsewhere as a potential alternative. Not as an alternative with all those caveats in framing but just so.
Communicating what it is even more boldly might be useful (I know it’s been done quite a lot in long self posts but that I’m not sure how much of that goes through)