Are not aware how metonymy works? Of course there are nice Americans. There are nice people everywhere. “The Americans” here is being used as a stand in for the actions of their government for at least the last sixty years. Longer, if you include the centuries of land theft, genocide, slaving, pillage, and terror. All of these acts were sanctioned by a government that was elected, supported, and funded by American citizens. This is who they are. The presence of a few friendly faces in a sea of greedy, rapacious cunts doesn’t change much.
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The Americans were always a bunch of evil, self-interested bastards — all that’s changed is they’ve stopped pretending otherwise.
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Well, you’re more optimistic than I am, but I hope you’re right.
The whole internet feels like it’s in a state of irrecoverable rot, and the last ten years have really tanked my confidence in governments to do anything about the clearly harmful, consumer hostile behavior inflicted on us — mostly because they seem to benefit a lot from letting Meta et al. do whatever they want. Like, EU fines, to date, have looked more like the organization wanting to wet their beak rather than fixing anything. I don’t know.
I was counting from when Facebook et al. became a clear problem — because, again, while I’m glad the EU is looking at this, it’s the US that has needed to take action. Their refusal to do so has left it to the EU to try to something, and i disagree that whatever they end up doing will make a difference. Like, if the price of the crime is a fine, then the crime is legal for a company as big as Meta.
Justified? Absolutely. Timely? Hardly.
My point was it’s more than a decade too late, and all the EU will do is levy a minor fine that Meta won’t even blink at. The only country that could impose real consequences is the US, and they have no interest in anything that doesn’t benefit these nightmare cyberpunk megacorps.
This is like an article declaring, “EU Investigates MySpace for causing child addiction and harm” – the people they’re trying to protect don’t use that product any more. The time to do this investigation was fifteen years ago, and the US government should have been the ones to do it.
Don’t get me wrong – fuck Facebook. I hope they have to pay billions. But the people that company is harming now are adults and the elderly. I’m sure fifteen years from now, once all those people are dead, there’ll be an in-depth investigation and legislation about it.
The FTC will take ten years to accomplish nothing of value – and even whatever fig-leaf ruling they issue will be sued into oblivion, or voided by the Supreme Court.
Privacy is dead because killing it was in the interest of too many wealthy and powerful companies, government agencies, and individuals for it to have ended up any other way.
This is the kind of fucked up joke I’m here for.
The two-tier reply system on SO is really useful and would be harder to implement – the replies to the questions, but also replies to the posts/replies. I don’t know how that would look if starting from Lemmy as a base.
I also like the bounty system to highlight questions the community feels are important to answer, which doesn’t have an obvious equivalent in Lemmy.
Tagging is also really good and important – both general tags that should be public and probably defined by the instance/moderators or by the software itself, and user tags which should be private or semi-private and more open. That’s stuff that would have to be built.
There’s also a zillion ways to improve the user experience. Multiple acceptable answers. Better filtering and search. Better clarity around edit histories.
Really, I think the best course would be to start from scratch, but it’ll take more time to get up and running.