I led with understanding, and I’m the one who mentioned teenagers in the comment I wrote with my own two hands

I understand wanting to do this as a parent, but I’m so thankful I grew up without cell phones. I would never track a teenager. I feel like teenagers need space to assert their own autonomy and form an identity apart from their parents. When I think of the best moments I had with friends, it’s almost always something that would have technically gone against my parents’ knowledge and wishes, even though my parents were very good to me overall.

Someone buried yahoo in a pet sematary

I forget Yahoo! exists until suddenly they’re involved in the most unexpected ways

I wondered what they’d do next to make discord even worse. That’ll do it.

Perhaps ironically, the article itself is an ad.

To save anyone a click, it tells you to uncheck “promotions” and “social” in gmail settings. (I can tell you from personal experience that Google’s willingness to respect this setting is dodgy.)

It also suggests using a non-chromium browser with an adblocker.

This isn’t in the article, but obviously using an email client like Thunderbird might help.

It finishes by suggesting you to try Tuta™ Mail for free! Which, after reading this needlessly wordy article only to be hit with an ad, I’ve just decided I will never ever do.

Yep! And it wasn’t that long ago I actually lost my job explicitly for being gay, which was totally legal. That’s one of the reasons the US has to fear-monger about other nations, so we won’t notice the exact same things or worse happening here.

It’s already here. We exploit incarcerated people for slave labor, and (I’m sure purely out of coincidence /s) we have one of the highest incarceration rates of any nation in the world. Not to mention private prisons, which is not a thing that would exist in any state existing in good faith.

It can’t be overstated how devastating this news will be for people who use these apps. People in these communities often use apps like these because it’s safer than being out and open at their physical locations and/or jobs.

Imagine growing up with this.

I know this isn’t your central point, but this is the scariest part to me. They’re never going to convince people like us that this is a superior way to communicate with tech because we know better. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon all know this. They don’t have to convince us. They just have to make it the new norm.

I used to mod a good-sized gaming discord server, and I saw so many young people say things like “Well, what do you expect? To watch someone’s YouTube content for free?” They don’t remember when YouTube was just a bunch of us randos posting fun stuff, and the most popular channels were shot in 360p on someone’s flip phone in a basement, and the site itself had some banner ads at most. Even the very first video shot by Jawed as an example practically fits this description. Now it’s become normal for it to be a monetized career, professionally shot and produced to be pushed to the top of the algorithm. I hate it, but all I have to do is take one look at YouTube’s home page to determine such is the case.

Search engines used to be things we managed by entering specific commands and conventions long forgotten, but if I try to explain to someone the benefits of such a system, they’d think I’m just some nostalgic boomer.

Forums used to be anonymous, and many still are, but not the most popular ones. It’s become normal to give at a bare minimum your personal location and phone number.

And it will unfortunately become normal for “AI” to hallucinate bullshit at us and accept the answer as “good enough” or whatever. Maybe it already has.

Oh jesus

Bookmarked in case I ever need it, thanks!

Doesn’t it also require a phone number?

Oh I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. My instance actually disables downvotes, so I can’t see that, but there are a lot of reddit transplants here (I’m one of them), and reddit’s takes on things like feminism and women are overall not … good.

It never went away in the first place

Yes, last I checked, one of their prime hate forums r/KotakuInAction was still active, and still filled with the most pathetic little insects seething about the fact that women and minorities exist in media. Gamergate has never really ended. Most people just stopped paying attention to these fools.

Unfortunately, that’s easy for me to say, since I’m not on the receiving end of their doxxing and death threats.

I haven’t had the best life, but I just can’t fathom being such a total loser that I’d ever get that worked up over something like video games.

Good question. I’d mostly like to avoid entities like my car insurance provider from collecting information on my driving, things like that.

I have an old car with no advanced technology whatsoever. Could this be avoided by turning off my phone while driving, or can they still acquire data?

I haven’t experienced any of the problems mentioned in this article while using Firefox + uBO (on Windows, Linux, and Fennec fork on Android), nor while using the Tubular app on Android.

From a user named fucksmith on reddit lmao

Clownass corporation