The "Friends" tab (sometimes "Feed" instead; the A/B testing on this one seems strong) only shows the posts of people you know. Events is still there as well. But in both cases the rate of creation has dropped dramatically since the time you remember, making these nearly useless. That's why the social media services have had to focus on content created by professional content creators instead.
The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat before you grow tired of it.
Why would nobody see it? "Friends"/"Feed" is a chronological view of all your friend posts. Unless their friends are posting so much that they can't keep up, which is completely unrealistic these days, your posts are going to pretty hard to miss.
But, in practice, nowadays people who have something to share with those they care about will do so through some sort of messaging application, including Facebook Messenger, so posting really only ends up being for the sake of the casual acquaintances you've accumulated as Facebook friends over the years. What, exactly, do you want to let them know?
Also the way it works, for some reason it decides 2-3 people are my besties (they are not) and just shows me what they post, ignoring what everyone else is posting, so it's still useless.
Who doesn't know it exists? You know it exists. More likely nobody cares to use it because they don't really get much from their acquaintances' cat photos, in much the same way we were unable to come up with anything you want to share with your acquaintances. It turns out that people soon realize that the hundreds of random people they accumulated as "friends" over the years don't actually matter in their life. Those that do matter are already engaged using messaging services (SMS, iMessage, Messenger, etc.). Social media is alive and well, but it moved to places where you can actually be social, away from the "say and spray" venues like Facebook.
Also, you can choose to filter that feed by "Favorites". Did you mistakenly end up in that mode?
To add context, every male in my high school went on that site. Pol was just a place crazy people posted. We used to laugh and read eachother dumb copypastas at lunch with gorgonzola cheese rhymes and bad puns.
The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.
Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?
If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
a) It seems that no one actually saw the school map to state that it really exists.
b) Doom maps are flat 2D blueprints with varying floor heights, they are quite unsuitable to “simulate” any building with multiple floors, not to mention complete lack of realism in everything else in the game (say, player has a speed of a car relative to the environment). There are some tricks in modern ports to combine detached level geometry into seemingly whole thing for niche maps, but those were not available at the time.
c) Trying to copy one's own school, house, or city block is the most stereotypical thing kids do when they find the level design tools. I remember quite a number of Counter-Strike maps that were nice at least visually, if not gameplay-wise, which were made that way. Surely, not everyone put that much work into a typical map made to play a couple of times with friends.
It seems that cases of overreaction to such funny nonsense that still happen after 30 years, despite everything, are something to scratch your head about.
The real situation is more complex. Harris did use game metaphors:
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
Of course, those cliches are not unique to Doom, and were just borrowed from comics and fantasy. We should generalise. The real hypocrisy is that people like to enjoy media and entertainment about The Hero domination everything and everyone, and don't want to be restricted in consuming that, but, at the same time, they don't like to become mere film extras that get shot by the dozen when some idiot believes in that fantasy a bit too much, and decides to live the dream. This is not limited to shootings. If you hate people so much, but instead of getting guns and ammo get yourself hired by social network data extraction press, it's not a straight path to electric chair, but a “successful IT career”. If you read trashy action packed novels, and consider that crippled offspring of romanticism as ideal life, you can try that high-adrenaline amusement ride, as long as it happens in some distant land, and can be called “military career” by others.
So media and entertainment significantly shape everyone's life, but limiting that argument to a small number of scapegoat cases is cowardice.
The general point though is if 99.999% of people doing a thing are fine, but one wacko who likes the thing does a shooting, the evidence for causal connection between the thing and the wackos impetus is beneath the noise floor.
If you are trying to make the argument that The Heros Journey is subtely toxic and evil, well thats just too sophisticated an argument for me. 70% of humanity believes in god. We live beyond truth and measure. Welcome to monkey planet.
There's a difference between monkey-see-monkey-do and intentional group self-radicalisation. You don't become a racist neo-Nazi teenage mass murderer de novo.
A subset of the population will always be murderous and delusional about something. Just a fact of biology that not everyone is physically or mentally fit.
Sure. It's probably not a good thing we have spaces designed to cook the brains of users to the extent that their weakest links are driven to act on their worst impulses and commit ideologically-driven murder, though.
I'm generally on the side of free speech, but having visited /pol/, I can't say it is/was a good place for its inhabitants or society at large.
How many mass shooters had obvious 4chan radicalization roots? Christchurch definitely.
> everything you read online is false
In its own way, this is also poisonous. It enables holocaust denialists and anti-vaxxers: after all, vaccines and holocaust memorials are on the mainstream internet, so they must be false, right?
Have you gone on social media recently? It is like 90% nonfactual weirdness. Even here on hackers news its tons of mutually exclusive unfalsifiable assertions of perspective, not fact.
I dont know about your family, but mine is pretty religious. Listening to their conversation during thanksgiving gives me about a 90% nonfact rate.
I think humans are just are not beings of fact in general.
> The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.
The real problem is when the internet leaks and boomers assume everything they read online is true.
Worst part of it all? My parents always told me not to trust what's on the internet, and now I have to tell them 99% of what they see on FB or whatever is AI trash and lies.
Adding even more context /pol/ is about who can be the most edgy edgelord of the hour. I doubt there are more than half a dozen actual racists people on it not counting 4Chan-GPT.
It's not hard to find people with a racist /pol/er's opinions in real life, or on other social media like Instagram or Twitter. Maybe /pol/ in particular is/was filled with bots, I don't know, but such extreme racism is not as uncommon as you imply these days.
They put on a good show. Real racist people post videos of the f&#$ed up things they do to others that I won't even describe here. They know better than to use a clear-web site especially one using a CDN to show off their behavior. Those forums are on Tor.
4chan is nearly all angsty edgy teens on their cell phones at school trying to act tough and edgy and even they get arrested when talking tough about cops or pulling shenanigans like defacing or vandalizing property to be cool. That's a different interesting topic. Search youtube for all the 4chan unstable kids getting arrested. It's on-par with all the unstables vandalizing Tesla cars.
Well, I believe you that there are lots of kids there that try to seem racist for 4chan cred, and I guess people would know not to post videos of themselves doing those illegal things.
But I remember they had stuff like "n*gger chimpout" compilation threads, and whenever people talk about what they blame on Jews, they seem to be actually bitter and angry, so they do seem legitimately racist. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of overlap with the people who do commit those acts of violence you're talking about, but even if not, I don't think you could say they're not real racists just because they don't post videos of themselves committing violent hate crimes. The board is just diluted by low-effort threads and bait by users of other boards.
But I remember they had stuff like "ngger chimpout" compilation threads*
I guess that's why we don't really see quite eye-to-eye on this. I've seen all those threads and to me that's just kids being edgy because they know it triggers or activates people. Every group has it's trash and they are just singling out one specific groups shenanigans. The same behavior can be found of every breed of human and they would post it if it was edgy to do so. My breed has no shortage of dumb behavior but when it's posted people feel comfortable laughing at it thus it's not edgy or taboo enough.
As a side note, most of the kids on 4chan are also here on HN. They talk about this site, its users and dang all the time. I'm sure they are not happy that I am pointing out they are just LARPing.
Compilation threads like those seem to me more like ways to make each other angrier and more racist. I think they legitimately just hate black people. Like, there's definitely some element of smug self-aware memey edginess about being racist, but there's also unironic vitriolic racism. But yeah, I guess we just disagree here on this.
Many of the popular internet terms start on 4chan, and then move to reddit and the rest of the internet, and then eventually mainstream news, and 65 year olds mouths. This process takes about 3-5 years.
i think a lot of people are fixating on the market.
I will share a metaphor you can spread.
I run a mile every morning not because it is the most calorie
efficient way to get around, nor because it is the most monetarily productive use of my time, but because it keeps my legs strong and me healthy.
It's a good metaphor, but I guess the idea here is that a middle-aged sedentary person has suddenly decided, for his own good, to only eat what he can catch and kill with his bare hands.
My history is not that good, but I have a fondness for the guilded age. Lets look back for wisdom.
Consider a case that was not unique, the growth of iron production in the great lakes area between 1855 and 1865.
In 1855 it was 1000 tons of iron ore. By 1860 it was over 100,000. By 1865 it was a few times greater than that.
Now consider even a single year in there where production is increasing by thousands to tens of thousands of tons. Good business. (The machines used to load and unload those boats and the change in boat designs is awesome by the way. Worth looking up.)
That was early. With much worse technology, and much less capital.
There were crazier deltas in production increase in the 1890's and across the guilded age.
The US natural resources are gigantic. There are 330 million people living there. It has more resources than ever before in history.
Steel and plastic are currently produced in the hundreds of millions of tons per year in the US. That is hardly a middle aged man who cant do a pushup.
With a proper 10 year boom, US production could be exponentially increasing year over year. If it and its people choose it.
A lot of people in the US seem to be envisioning this. It is a really non-abstract vision even for americans of... modest intelligence.
It may be the case that providing the world with banking and facebook, and silicon plans, though possibly much more lucrative than physical production, is just too abstract for the average american to identify with as a positive.
Or it may be the case that physical production is more lucrative than software service export, but that the US government has mismanaged the market constraints in the physical domain and so it just appears to not be the case.
I am not sure which is true. What I do know is that for the average person, the idea of making stuff and trading it is simple to understand, and people like it. Even people who do not make anything identify with this goal. Maybe instead of iron and steel it will be nvidias chips this time around.
I think Americans dont like being the social media export country. Its just not a good future vision you can identify with.
and the followup which address the noise impredictability problem.
there are more after that which i believe fail the black pill and miss the point of ml, asicifying the architecture with human priors. But the broader point is to show that rl is not just discovering solutions by chance in random actions. Nature starts with priors, and curiosity is one of the universal policy bootstrapping techniques. (others might be imitation, next state prediction, total nearby replication count)
There is also a paper that deployed ICM on a physical robot and it just played with a ball because it was the only source of novel stimuli, and inadvertantly learned how to operate its arms. There was no other reward in the environment except for curiosity.
It is amazing, and slightly creepy. I think the ICM will be rediscovered later in ML tech.
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