2k20, what's the worst enormous tech company?

some very high level points:

i don't live in SF
i started working at twitter at the end of last year
happy to stop posting ITT if it has a chilling effect
i don't think twitter is worst enormous tech company

Though you also have the related, aggravating phenomenon where governments and the media continue to over-value the voices of tech executives who have seen the light, many of whom tend to push more technology (an app that limits your screentime, etc.) as the solution to tech-company-created problems rather than policy or regulatory solutions.

this is otm. "how can we do this terrible thing so it does less harm" vs. "just don't do the terrible thing".

Pretty clear the consensus is that your voice is valued here in case there’s lingering doubt.

It probably doesn’t help the regulatory context that a lot of these executives are being socialized by the likes of Peter Thiel and Gavin Belson.

caek can you confirm whether you've got culture

happy to stop posting ITT if it has a chilling effect

nah, Tracer and I may disagree on the tenor of some of glenn's posts, but they certainly didn't prevent people from posting.

I literally was mostly joking guys lol

i don't think twitter is worst enormous tech company

enormous tech companies are so uniformly bad that they all deserve harsh criticism, but facebook sets such a high bar it's amazing that any other enormous tech company would ever be considered for "worst".

I'm open to the idea that Amazon shouldn't be considered a tech company, but they are more harmful than FB imo. Or at any rate, I think there's plenty of room for debate there

amazon's one of, if not the largest, cloud providers

they also do some internal hardware development, including their own processors for servers

I think that I just find Twitter to be so obnoxious, just a veritable chasm of depravity and blather, that I inflate its evilness to an extreme it doesn't deserve. Amazon and Facebook are obviously much much worse.

I know mh, but they also own grocery and other retail stores plus logistics and shipping etc. Basically I mean they're something even worse than a 'mere' tech company

how about only posts itt that have a thrilling effect

(Google over hear listening quietly, taking notes, nodding softly)

I don't get in what universe Amazon isn't a tech company. Beyond all the significant side business that have already been mentioned, it is precisely their innovations in internet commerce, big data management, and high tech logistics and warehousing that's given them a monopoly over retail. They did this because they are a tech company and not a brick and mortar bookstore or whatever.

Amazon is predatory as hell, but at least they make their profits by providing functions that accomplish useful tasks. FB is little more than a sugar-coated poison pill.

amazon corporate (i.e. not logistics) is apparently finding it very difficult to hire, especially engineers

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/setxnt/psa_one_of_the_fangs_is_about_to_internally/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-01-24/amazon-employees-are-burned-out-and-leaving-their-jobs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/amazon-is-raising-base-salary-cap-to-350-000-from-160-000

(Google over hear listening quietly, taking notes, nodding softly)

Hear, hear. They’ve done some very close work with the carceral industrial complex. And you thought you turned off tracking on Maps? Ha jokes on you.

Had to consider Google-proofing that post.

I just consider Google far, far more ominous than something like Twitter - FB & Amazon might justifiably take most of the heat, but we've allowed Google into our lives in ways that most of us are probably not even aware of.. and I don't even have a Google account

*squawk* Drones inbound on viborg, I repeat, drones inbound

*squeal* roger that, target acquired

*squawk* copy that

Yeah I don’t think living in China necessarily improved my sense of always being under surveillance.

But

https://pandodaily.com/2014/03/07/the-google-military-surveillance-complex/

I don't know how serious some of these posts are, but you cannot actually googleproof your posts on ilxor.com unless you put them on the secret borad

xpost

Haven’t really seen anyone refute these claims of political censorship either.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html

Rob, I think you meant:

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Rob I was being genuine but just in the sense that I gave a passing thought to not putting “Google” and “Maps” together in the same phrase cause whatever. Maybe that wouldn’t matter in the slightest granted. But for example if I wanted to mention the awful Nazi sympathizer website that is on Facebook’s political oversight board, wouldn’t writing br31tb4rt effectively Google-proof it?

Anyway here’s the reason I came here today to share my paranoia with y’all. This is discouraging.

On Twitter: “False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people.” False info was 70% more likely to be retweeted & travelled 6x faster than truth. pic.twitter.com/XwbNzVXwgB

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) February 10, 2022

I was like, "St*rmfr*nt is on Facebook's political oversight board????????" for a bit too long

xp lol amazing, DJP did you do that manually or is there a google-proofer out there?

viborg: yes, that makes it harder to search for with a text-based search engine; I just meant google crawls & indexes this site regularly regardless of orthography, so there's no way to google-proof something from the eyes of google, if that makes sense?

DJP reintroducing leetspeak to the masses

There's already an old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Nice to have it so neatly confirmed by real world data.

haha I wish I could say I typed that but I was never that fluent in l337speak; I used this: http://www.brenz.net/services/l337Maker.asp

On false info being more likely to be retweeted - isn't this also that ppl who consume "traditional" news are likely to have social circles where others do the same, while ppl who consume fake news have much more of an "OMG EVERYONE MUST SEE THIS" impulse? Like when I'm talking about the news of the day on social media I seldom feel the need to share any news item unless someone specifically asks for that,

I think that's confirmation bias tbh

everyone reading clickbait headlines and not reading the articles, even when they are decent, is killing me

I feel like the axios style of what amounts to tiny paragraphs and bullet points is far from ideal, but they’re really directly mimicking the style of someone screenshotting two paragraphs from an article, tweeting it, and going viral

I spent an inordinate amount of time making fun of Upworthy-style headlines on Facebook, then discovered that one of my classmates (who was on my friend list) was Head of Audience and Business Development at Upworthy.

As a result, I spent a lot more time making fun of Upworthy. I'd say this had a good influence because he no longer works at Upworthy but he's now at Fatherly, so I think it's really a wash.

Fatherly, so I think it's really a wash.

last night I put on Dan Deacon - I was just listening to the record but I looked a song up on YouTube to post it here. I think I also visited the RYM page for it.

two hours later I go to bed and check FB and get a notification saying "You have been recognized as one of Dan Deacon's top fans". I don't think I've ever even visited his FB page. I didn't visit the YouTube link on the same browser I use FB for.

I know you're supposed to expect FB to be tracking every single thing you do but still, this kind of shit freaks me out. idk if I posted about this but a couple years ago it spotted me in a picture someone else posted, a person I have no mutual friends with...and I was so far in the background I didn't even see where I was until FB pointed it out.

what i would give to be recognized as a top fan :(

post more

i've posted all i can!!

haha

damn, if that's all it takes, lean times for Dan Deacon

man alive, you have been recognized as one of Dan Deacon's top haters

what most people dont know is that the google drive icon represents a troppy disk, a common form of data storage in europe for most of the 2000s that fell out of use as usb sticks became more popular pic.twitter.com/C0a1px6gMC

— laura (@freezydorito) March 10, 2022

a friend just sent me this photo from #SXSW of a facebook/@Meta VR booth there. starting to suspect this *may* not be the best company to hold a near-monopoly over our shared digital future... hmm... pic.twitter.com/OtQVhp0fdD

— Dave Infante (@dinfontay) March 15, 2022

uh

mh otm

Eh. It beats Warhol's longest by a couple of hours.

IDGI? Are they actually enticing people to see what it’s like being trapped alive under the collapsed towers?

Found a new one

https://www.palantir.com/in-defense-of-europe/en/

SCOOP: Facebook is exploring the creation of virtual currency (dubbed 'Zuck Bucks' internally) for the metaverse, "social tokens" & lending services

Its finance push comes despite the collapse of its Diem/Libra cryptocurrency project earlier this year 🧵https://t.co/1sCAQkEtZG

— Hannah Murphy (@MsHannahMurphy) April 6, 2022