Surely you’re aware of the embrace, extend, extinguish corporate strategy.

People only get to decide what they want from their platform until facebook starts extending the spec. Then your client will become incompatible with some posts, and so on and so forth.

In summary, it’s a threat to the platform itself.

If there was a bot that just flooded All with far right talking points, do you think admins ought to block that or leave it to the users?

What if it was far right mixed in with cat memes?

What if it started more slowly like a few posts an hour and then ramped up over 6 months to be 1000s of posts per hour?

Exactly, I hereby decide that I would like to ignore corporate efforts to undermine this burgeoning new platform. I furthermore reserve the right to complain about the loss of said platform in future years by claiming that it’s everyone elses fault for allowing corporate encroachment.

It’s pretty masterful marketing by Google really.

They’ve re-defined privacy to mean “hidden to everyone but google” as in, “google knows everything about me and does a really good job of keeping that information secure”.

I’m very quickly becoming old and weird for clinging to the belief that no one, including google, should know anything about me other than things I explicitly tell them, and they should only use those things for purposes I explicitly permit.

Gen Y often talk about “responsible ads”. Or threads about “devs need to get paid (through intrusive ad platforms)”. It’s… exasperating. I got a notification on my Android phone to configure topic reporting for apps a few days ago.

Sorry I don’t really understand your position.

You’re rejecting the quotes from the article on the basis of the publication, suggesting a better accusation would be a “scam”, and then refuting that accusation as baseless.

I’m not trying to be an ass, I mean this as kindly as possible, but this is a straw man argument. You should look into logical fallacies. They’re well documented tactics for manipulating people and misrepresenting information. Everyone should. It will help you to reason about information and ultimately identify when you’re being manipulated.

If the app was banned due to it being a scam (which is not the case)

The term “scam” is a straw man. “Scam” is subjective, so you could define a scam as “an app that provides no content and steals your money” and conclude that the app in question is not that, and therefore fine.

The main assertion in the article is:

the app deliberately targets young men and encourages misogyny, including members of the app sharing techniques on how to control and exploit women. The firm has also claimed that there is evidence to suggest that the app is an illegal pyramid scheme

First instance of intellectual property piracy?

Perhaps, but of course there are still significant differences.

To make these copies you needed a team of highly skilled scribes and their accoutrements, and the ship had to wait in port for several days.

That is to say, these copies in babylon would have come at a significant cost.

JFC. Sometimes people visit us with kids and it’s just arrive > open youtube > commence rot > spice it up 9yo twerking.

My partner is pregnant with our first child. I get the convenience of free child distraction, I also get that I might find myself doing exactly this in several years, but honestly I really hope I can find ways to at least minimise this. It just seems so Orwellian or… wall-e-ian.

I swear my kids are probably going to hate me because I’ll be the most boring dad around that forces kids to play outside instead of doing all the fun stuff.

I’m sure they only do this while “mummy is visiting” and it doesn’t happen at home.

This sounds like hyperbole. Nuclear has been powering the world for decades. It may not have enjoyed sexy headlines, but it’s hard to believe billions of dollars has been invested in new plants without any research.

People were such dimwits about it though. Even if you had a security guard at the entrance to every shop challenging people to wear properly fitted n95s, I’m certain heaps of people would remove it after they walked past just on principle.

it’s got crypto.

Yeah this. I don’t automatically do things without thinking.

I like to make a cup of coffee each morning. It’s a habit. I don’t really spend time thinking about whether I’m going to do it first thing each morning because it’s so deeply ingrained - of course I will want to do that tomorrow when I wake up. I’ve performed this ritual so many times that I do know all the steps (although I do occasionally fuck it up).

However, I’m not going through this process like an automaton free of thought - somewhere between the bed and the kitchen there’s still a decision that I’m going to make a coffee. Some mornings I pee before coffee, some mornings it’s after - there are decisions being made.