I remember reading once that in the very first years of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, television was the form of mass media that was most critical of the regime. It just wasn’t as influential yet as newspapers and radio, so they didn’t care about it as much; when it became more popular, it too came more under the control of the communist regime.

I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.

I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.

The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.

I live in a country where the voting age is 16. It used to be 18 and I don’t think this change has caused many concrete policy changes: young people aren’t big or unified enough a voting bloc to meaningfully affect the results.

I tend to be in favor of letting young people have more rights at a younger age in general (in part because I remember being young and not seeing any good reason why I shouldn’t), so I’m definitely not in favor of raising it to 18 again or further.

which isn’t a bad thing either if you want to encourage people to have more kids (which of course is debatable whether that should be a goal, but many people think it should)

You don’t, if you have absolutely no way of accessing the internet or a phone network other than the phone you want to find, you’re out of luck and have to find it manually.

I think that mainly mocks the idea that if only people talked to each other more, communicated with each other more, tried to see things from the others’ perspective, then everything would be great and everyone would arrive at a common conclusion.

This is something that, as long as you ended up getting a job, you should really just not give a fuck about.

They probably had 1 position to fill, but got many times more applications than that, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50, maybe 100. That means that they had to reject 9 or 19 or 49 or 99 people and they have better things to do with their time than to explain this to all these people, however many they may be.

Not mostly how this works, it is true that for underage sex many countries do have laws like that, but those are usually special exceptions to the general principle that the laws of the place where you are (or where your actions have an effect) apply and not those of your home country or any arbitrary country.

Fortunately no one is forced to use it in a world where OpenStreetMap and apps that use it exist (OSM is exactly as good as volunteers made it).

I think it mainly means that Google invests a lot more money in the quality of its navigation for cars than bicycles, meaning that they think it’s pretty likely that the cycling directions might lead you into a place where it might not be a good idea to cycle.

“how to kill orphaned children in Java”

what do you mean Java is also the name of an island

“Can you program in Java?”

“Yes, if you pay for the plane ticket.”

Why does it seem you have all of a sudden started to look at information about sexual orientation? Did you miss that in the current information overload, everyone gets exposed to different information and no one can tell you why you are getting exposed to whatever you are getting exposed to?

No, it doesn’t.

The Wikimedia projects are made by volunteers, almost none of the money goes to actually making the content. Some of it does go into keeping the servers running or into software development.

And some of it goes into expanding an ever-increasing bureaucracy, which is tasked among other things with enforcing intransparent “global bans” or lighter sanctions against contributors the WMF doesn’t like (opinions of the editing community don’t matter at all on these). If they had less money, perhaps they would lay off some of their trust and safety team and not catch some people who are making useful contributions by evading global bans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer

There are so many more worthy free knowledge organizations to donate to: OpenStreetMap, FOSS projects (e.g. Software in the Public Interest), even Miraheze.

Even if you agree with that argument (which I don’t), that was written about ideologies like fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, which were (when they were relevant) actually very suppressive of free speech when they were in power, more so than current left-leaning authoritarians who are defending the blocking of ex-Twitter in Brazil or (worse) saying that other countries should do similar things.

Protecting citizens from receiving the wrong kind of information about political matters? That doesn’t sound democratic at all, much less like an important thing.

When I was younger I was taught that authoritarianism was a trait of right-wing politics.

I believed that at the time.

What I was taught was wrong, as we can see in this article.

No it wouldn’t, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.

On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.

I grew up with forums where emoticons were substituted with smiley images (on badly coded ones, “8)” turned into “😎” even when it was just a parenthetical ending with the number 8 or the eighth point in a bullet point list). I use emoji approximately when I would have used those smileys, it is a good thing they’re now standardized, but other than that I find them unnecessary and distracting.