devRant - A fun community for developers to connect over code, tech & life as a programmer

Storytime. Go watch social dilemma on netflix NOW. You might realize how much of hacked are you in terms of generating revenue for tech companies.

Ads have been the primary source of business for every web player. those weird sayings "ïf you are not paying the product, you are the product" are true but vague. Its all simple maths. if you are scrolling on your feed, and an add pops up, and you have ANY sort of interaction with it, like slowing your scroll, swiping across its items, clicking it, viewing its comments etc, then at least one of the parties involved achieved success and generated revenue. And that party would be the one responsible for making this behavior true for millions of users and billions of ads.

social media in a gist: "We are going to give a customized version of our product to every úser, so as to change the mindset of this person towards some stuff because we are getting paid for that"

What we are losing is tremendous when studied in terms of behaviors and psychology. we are becoming addicts. addicts to those continuous scrolls, those new posts when we make a swipe up gesture, those notification pings, these nonsense recommendations that are remotely connected to our interests . No matter how much tired you are and want a sweet death like sleep, a simple "PINGG" and you wanna go back to see what is it about.

Those bell icons. Those are the fucking worst. a collection of all the notifications that will catch the center of user's attention. User hates the red number on its bar , so let's fill it with more and more notifs than required. I bet the upcoming decade will see ads in the notification bar too. those big fanged Faang giants are just waiting on one another to see who tries it out first.

Social media has shown to make young gens much more depressed fragile , nd less comfortable in taking risks fearing the backlash. the rates of getting a driver's license are decreasing while the rates of suicides and self harm among teens is increasing.Real dates are now decreasing while the viewership of porn industry is staggering. even the parents or old gens which are not much into social media are getting effected by this, because the children are transferring their fears of social media interaction to the whole family environment.

And you know who is going to be the next big player in terms of using a mass manipulating tool for commercial benefits? News and Journalism industry. And THAT WOULD BE HORRIBLE! Imagine someone paying news channels to target people with certain beliefs and presenting news in a biased manner as opposed to rational manners

social media is one of the best tools of persuasion. and in the hands of a dictator or a cult, it is more dangerous than a nuclear bomb. We think that recommendation Algorithms are designed to help us gain more knowledge as they are gonna recommend us similar content. but what these algorithms are doing is to move our attentions pan from something that we are interested in to something which is commercially profitable, in the common interest of a large group and which we might be interested in too. i can think of a million times when i went from watching college subject lectures to cat videos

We have now 4 types of political deviations : the people who are absolute supporters of the ruling party, the people who are absolute supporters of the opposition party, the critics and propaganda community which throws dirt at both and the people who are neutral and not inclined to anywhere. the propaganda community consists of social media, tools and content maker which could easily flood the streams of everyone else with the beliefs they want / are paid to and their major target is to move the natural bias of un-inclined people in a particular direction. and this is wrong, it is a wrong thing to disrupt a natural balance for personal benefits, being treated like zombies

A network provider has tons of data about us... its transferring the freaking packets of our voices and images. but it is governed by the national laws to not use them in wrongful ways. but the software industry have no laws for any kind of regulation. they can hoard as much data as they want, use it in whatever ways they want and yet call themselves as "self regulated" by paying shit tonnes of bribes.
The need to be controlled, come under government jurisdiction. taxes should be enforced on how much data they can collect as they have the power to undermine the whole democratic systems using their tools and data.

The only question that is left asking is : how to not get affected with this continuous hacking while being in this industry itself? How do i make money off this 2 edged sword that is technology without getting cut myself? How to not being a mindless zombie for these giants trying to make everyone a small node of their massive eco system?