PrimalAnimist

Collections add a little something real to an interest. You are into baseball? Collect baseball cards and baseball memorabilia. Some find a tactile connection improves their enjoyment. For some people, it may be old video games, for others it may be coins, stamps, achievements in video games. Yes they are digital, but you can see them in your achievement/trophy list. I think some people are drawn to collections more than others because they favor a certain learning style over another. I’m not educated in behavior in any way so I am qualified to share my opinion on the Internet. There’s nothing abnormal about that. The collecting part. Not the part where I have no real knowledge on a topic but I feel my opinion is worthy of being heard. That’s actually normal, too, probably. But it shouldn’t be.

It may just be the weed, but for a moment I thought I was reading something off a Night City public BBS.

You can’t tell anyone this, but I have a friend who is deep inside the insurance industry. Some of the big guys have invested heavy into LEDs. So to maximize the LED investments, they give manufacturers safety discounts for every LED they can attach to their shit. Big guys make some extra zeros for their accounts, and sharpie and 3M get some splash, too.

I love seeing pictures of the world from other people’s perspective. Urban shots. Nature shots. Any old boring shots like just a side road you walk down, or a tree you like to sit under. I like being able to see the quiet places in the world as well as the loud ones.

If that describes a lot of anyone’s posts, add me there and I will follow you back https://pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/577121287304400256

I do not believe upvotes and down votes are enough information to reveal the identity of anyone. If this was truly such a risk, where has the concern for this been on Facebook, where you can see who leaves reactions by name. Or Discord where every account that clicks a reaction is available?

Here that info is not available to the public at large. On Facebook it’s available to anyone who sees a post. Why haven’t security voices been pressuring Facebook to not track social reactions if it’s so dangerous?

This is a feature of social media for the most part. What I write as posts and comments is available to everyone as is vastly more useful info for someone to collect.

I don’t understand the concern over it really. I mean you are on social media. My comments are much more telling than my up and down votes lol. I think this general sense of “I want to be social but I don’t want anyone knowing it’s me” is an interesting trend though.

No, I keep some things private. But some things, like reactions and upvotes, are just as public to me as the posts I make is my point. It just isn’t a concern for me personally.

The things I upvote and downvote are in line with my personal values and I am not ashamed of that. I have no issues with anyone knowing my reaction to a post. On Discord anyone can see who leaves reactions on a message. Same with Facebook. It will show you who added what reaction.

I agree with that logic. But for me personally, I don’t feel “locked” into google. There are no contracts, no penalties for moving to some other service if I need. I never use customer support from any of these services because I find it’s easier to just look for the answers myself. I have no loyalty to any company, I simply use what best serves me at the time. All corps are interested in profit over people, so there’s really no company I have found to be fully ethical and transparent while offering a competing service that is as reliable.

I have the free 15 GB of cloud storage with them, but I don’t use it. I keep my data on my own cloud storage box. Yes, I have a gmail account, but I also have a proton.me account that I use more than gmail. Also, pretty much every big service out there is powered by Google and/or Amazon (see Twitter lol), so looking at the big picture, right now, we are dependent on Google in ways we are not even aware.

This is also why I am excited to see the shift to open source and self-hosting. I think a time is coming, too, where big companies are going to have to pay us for access to our data. I’ve made almost $200 just casually answering questions for the Google Rewards app. Sometimes it’s a dime, sometimes fifty cents, occasionally a question nets more. Those credits can be used to pay for any google services or purchases. I usually buy movies I can’t find on streaming services with my Google Rewards credits (my pirate days are long gone, it’s just not as convenient for me anymore and if I can’t watch it through a service or buy it, I just don’t need to watch it lol).

I really want to self-host a lemmy server sometime in the next year, I have a Core i5 desktop that’s not dead, just sits in a closet. My wish is to have all my personal social media self-hosted and I can choose who I want to federate with and who I don’t. But I’m not a pioneer. I’m waiting til this all settles a little to see if it’s worth the work.

Check out Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network here (US), and I get unlimited data, no rate limits. I have three phone numbers on my account and it costs me $85 a month total. Also the phones from the Fi store are super cheap if you stay on Google Fi. My pixel 7 got $300 off at purchase and $100 for my old phone. They are unlocked, too. Something I hate when buying from other providers. One of my phones had a Verizon sim and a Google Fi e-sim, so I can switch services with easy. Here in the mountains, service can be spotty in places with TMobile. Wifi calling is also available though, so that helps, too. I abandoned US Cellular entirely.

I still use Google news to follow some topics and it gathers articles from my local news sites, too. But any time if shows an article that prompts me to register to see it, I just go back to the Google news page and tell it to block that source.

You annoy me once and you disappear lol.

But Meta doesn’t own social media. They have some social media platforms that are finding direct, open-source alternatives to their service…for FREE. The days of uncontested, corporate-controlled, AI-manipulated social media have come to an end.

I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.

I feel like they all see the inevitability that AI will drastically change the money model very soon. And it will not be to their profit, so best make every penny they can right now is their mentality.

That’s really difficult to do with a karma-like system. People posting in echo-chambers can post misinformation but receive many up votes.

Credibility is subjective. For example, people on one side of a political ideology will not think people on the opposite side are credible. So who can really determine an “attribute of credibility”?

We would have to agree on a standard first and that’s just not going to happen.

Former redditor. What do I call myself now? Lemming? lol But I also noticed that I don’t see some Karma score equivalent, which is a great thing to leave behind. Those imaginary points were just useless at best, and used against people who were new at the worst.

True, users do maintain copyright of anything they write, but they also give reddit license to use it how it wants, including sub-licensing it to others. That means the corps absolutely DO NOT need the permission of users to train their AI. They just buy the rights to use the data from reddit.

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

• See https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement Section 5. “Your Content”

This includes images and videos that are uploaded to the reddit servers directly.

Reddit has the right to use the data and sell that data to others. Also, some data you can scrape, but there’s additional data that is available only through the API. Web scraping is not reliable, especially if reddit actively flags your spider and blocks it. They are not the idiots we want to believe they are. No mega corp is going to risk not having competitive access to data to feed their AIs when the cost for them to just pay is insignificant.

Let’s be honest, this price change was all about being able to charge the big corps mega money for access to their data in order to train new generations of AI. The price is absurd, yes, but the owners of reddit know that Google and Microsoft have deep pockets (among other global corps wanting the massive amount of data reddit has saved).

They never expected the third party apps to be able to pay this much and frankly, they don’t care. It’s HUGE profit from AI corps, and the losses, at least short term, will be overshadowed by the gains. Long term? I don’t know, this isn’t my area of expertise, but, like I did with Twitter, I have moved on so at this point, it’s no longer relevant to me.