Do you have some reference? The one (rather simple/incomplete) that I could find at : https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/erectile-... shows that overall ED dropped, maybe it is different for young men but would be curious to see an actual study.
If there was any increase of reported incidents of ED over the 30 years I would hazard to guess that it would have to do with the fact that various medications have been released over the last 30 years to address it. Fewer people will report an embarrassing issue when there is a narrow chance it can even be fixed.
As far as I remember, last time I needed to use Google play on a shared phone I could just create a random Google address (I mean, completely invented name, etc.) and it allowed me to do anything, just as my normal Android.
I am too lazy to test, but did this change? Can't you just make a "fake" account and continue with your life? The phone company knows where you are, the bank knows what you purchase. Compared to that Google will know far less (ofc, if you don't activate everything)
I find it much more insane that it was possible for so long to do banking WITHOUT strong authentication (however implemented) by just providing those 3 numbers on the back of the card (strong security!)
You can create a Google account without adding a phone number, that's still possible currently.
To do this you need to make it within an app, for example Google Play Store or YouTube, not on the websites. You also need to use a trusted IP, so you shouldn't use a VPN. To avoid handing out your home WiFi IP, you can use a public WiFi point or use cellular which cycles IPs more quickly.
> If you are not in good standing with Google, you cannot bank!!
> I cannot stress how inane it is, to have Google or Apple as the gatekeeping to identify verification. How not having an active, in good standing account with one of these two, means you cannot bank.
Having to register some phone number (does not need to be your main number, a sim card is quite cheap) to a "fake/unused" email address (even if as you say you are required yo) does not require you to "be in good standing with Google" and they are not gatekeepers of identity.
At this point in time I feel the banks and the mobile phone operators are much worse managers of identity, because, for example they even accept stolen identifiers to make an account in "your name" - for me that's more ridiculous, not that they require some multiple factor of authentication.
> It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more.
This regulation is not about consumption but about production. Yes, this would not solve the potential over-consumption (I agree generally with what you say) - people actually buying shit they use once - but imagine how bad it is if for each shit used once the company produce 3x that shit...
Isn't this the normal sales anyhow for many products? One attracts a customer with unreasonable promises and features, makes him sign a deal to integrate, then issues appear once in production that make you realize you will need to invest more.
When you start something (startup, FOSS project, damn even marriage) you might start with the best intentions and then you can learn/change/loose interest. I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing.
Turning it around, any company that adopts a FOSS project should be honest and pay for something if it does not accept the idea that at some point the project will change course (which obviously, does not guarantee much, because even if you pay for something they can decide to shut it down).
> I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing.
Obviously you cannot "demand" stuff but you can do your due dilligence as the person who chooses a technical solution. Some projects have more clarity than others, for example the Linux foundation or CNCF are basically companies sharing costs for stuff they all benefit from like Linux or Prometheus monitoring and it is highly unlikely they'd do a rug pull.
On the other end of the spectrum there are companies with a "free" version of a paid product and the incentive to make the free product crappier so that people pay for the paid version. These should be avoided.
I think what matters are the percentages. Out of the 16mn users where there more or less than in the general population? I think it is reasonable to think they were as many percentage wise, if not more - because internet provides anonymity which is an advantage.
Nowadays with the number of users of the internet converging slowly to the total populations, the percentages are probably converging as well.
> but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s
Without some data analysis I honestly don't know. Even before Internet (ex: FidoNet) there was plenty of very bad stuff out there, I don't see any clear reason why the pedos and groomers would have avoided it.
> We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow
I think what is much worse than in other mediums is the actual lack of a community that observes. In real life, for many cases, you would have multiple people noticing interactions between kids and adults (sports, schools, parks, shops, etc.), so actions might be taken when/before things get strange. On some of the social networks on the internet it is too much one-to-one communication which avoids any oversight.
So, for me, the idea of "more separation" seems to generate on the long term even more problems, because of lack of (healthy) interactions and a community.
Why should you use only bikes and walking? Cars/trucks have a role to play, it's just not the most efficient to move the majority of the people from one point to another. Simple examples: ambulances, firefighters, police, cranes.
True. I mostly meant not personal vehicles, so jut buses, trams etc. I supposed emergency services will use those dedicated lanes. or maybe civilization is so advanced those will be served via flying only. Idk just since fiction thinking.
If I understand correctly many organizations will not develop original stuff internally, because nobody internally wants to be the one is shouted at if something goes wrong.
That's a huge part of it. But also you presumably hired a full-time programmer for a reason, and in almost every case that reason was not to have somebody to write and maintain your CRM system. So any system they build and maintain is not just another thing for you to worry about, it's a huge chunk of time that the developer isn't doing what you hired them for.
Let's not mix "emotions" with "think". If I am afraid (emotion) about something happening, I will be afraid where the maximum damage can be done - in the queue before the security check (think). Most airports optimized that to reduce the queues, but there are still at least tens of people in a very narrow space.
But I personally do not care that much, because I think most terrorists are dumb or crazy, and you can't fix all dumb or crazy. Some of the dumb and crazy become terrorists, some become CEO-s, some do maintenance of something critical. If something really bad happens I would not feel much better if it was a "dumb CEO" that caused it or it was a "dumb terrorist".
Good they moderate. Most interesting is that they report a 60% increase user increase, up to 41M users. Considering how bad I heard "the other network" is now I wonder why so few.
I have a look at Bluesky from time to time and there is (for me ofc) as much info/interesting stuff as I was getting from the other one before the acquisition.
It’s interesting that we have such different experiences of Bluesky. There’s a thriving math community there, for example. Lots of independent journalists operating in my local area. And yes, I even chat about tech there—there’s a decent 3D printing feed, and a handful of interesting photography feeds.
I dunno. It probably depends on what you’re looking for.
I have never been on twitter so I don't really know but I can agree that we see tech community in twitter but the same isn't really there in bluesky.
Although I still have a web/programming which I follow and have found some people interesting from Hackernews and others too in bluesky (emsh,simonw)
What is the HN consensus around lemmy? I really like lemmy and think that it might be better for tech stuff (almost similar to HN/reddit you can say and federated)
I used to follow lemmy c/technology but I do feel like HN is pretty unique in its own manner.
Regarding twitter alternative itself. Maybe mastodon too can be an alternative.
Another minor nitpick about bluesky is that its 200 characters limits actually really removes the tech community from too deep discussions imo. Although I guess twitter had that limit for long time too until it got removed but now I do see sometimes some tweets which are really long (sometimes even complete blog?)
It actually really (pissed?) me off so much that I ended up making a tampermonkey script which can actually write a long message automatically and split a message into 200 messages chunk and post them in a thread of sorts you can say although its very hacky and messy and it starts to glitch around 10 threads from what I remember.
It's 300 characters. Have you considered writing it on leaflet.pub or something and linking it, if it's not a back and forth? There's already a + button in the post composer to split into multiple posts.
I think there's a few tweetlonger-type services that people have tried to make, but with atproto they can at least embed that extra text into the post (100kb limit), so the site only needs to stick around to view it.
> I think there's a few tweetlonger-type services that people have tried to make, but with atproto they can at least embed that extra text into the post (100kb limit), so the site only needs to stick around to view it.
Woah I didn't know this was possible, definitely gonna try out leaflet.pub, I did know about it, let's see.
Thank you for telling me about this!
Edit: Now tried leaflet.pub, looks really cool. I am gonna use it from here on out because I used to use mataroa.blog or bearblog but they didn't have comments and comments were something I always wondered.
Its comments actually hook up to bluesky itself. this does feel interesting.
I might use it from here on out or maybe the fediverse alternative to something like this (i think its name was writty or something like this) but I am pretty sure that I am gonna nowadays write on leaflet too a litte haha!
Thanks for sharing me this. I knew about leaflet.pub but didn't know that it hooked with bsky so well. Is it a recent feature or is it the case where I maybe misremembering somethings?
A lot of people joined in late 2024, resulting in a peak of around 2.7M daily users, but most of those users ended up leaving soon after, likely because the site was just one big echo chamber of far left American politics around that time.
It doesn't seem to be as bad anymore, a quick glance at the public feed suggests that the percentage of political posts has gone down, but considering how many times the word "toxic" appears in this linked blogpost, I'm guessing they're still banning anyone who expresses the "wrong" opinions, so the userbase is unlikely to grow much further in the future. It seems to have plateaued at around 1.2M daily likers.
> likely because the site was just one big echo chamber of far left American politics around that time.
The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
Maybe you meant to say liberal, to which I'd agree.
That's not to say there isn't a "left" or "far left" on Bluesky, but there's no way it's a majority.
I agree echo chambers are a problem there, which is why I only posted there briefly before leaving. One feature that seemed to exacerbate the formation of echo chambers was users sharing and blindly trusting mass block lists to silence things they didn't want to hear (leftists and liberals alike).
Meanwhile my facebook feed is nothing but clickbait engagement with local nazis. It's such a hard right echo chamber now, it makes me sick. Clear evidence of multiple international bot accounts flooding groups with propaganda every 30 minutes. It's a flood.
There's really a problem that needs to be solved here. I really think anonymous or phony posting needs to stop. It's not helpful here. All it does is amplify false talking points with a "Fake it til you make it", "the loudest voice wins" methodology.
But unfortunately, engagement is financially incentivized now. So the big corps reap $$$$$ while the public burns itself down.
> my facebook feed is nothing but clickbait engagement with local nazis
Can you explain what exactly you mean by "local nazis"? Are you getting ads for Nazi barber shops? Sieg Heil Heating & Cooling? Hitler Juice Bar and Bubble Tea?
If this was such a huge problem I'm sure we would have heard of it before.
No. Pre-Musk twitter was a liberal cesspool (and now it's a conservative one). Most of those liberals jumped ship to Bluesky.
Again, that's not to say lefists don't exist, but they are a tiny fraction, and always were a tiny fraction no matter what platform.
Don't rule out bots that exist in numbers to make the actual left appear like a deranged spectacle as a form of controlled opposition. Both parties of capital interests have a role in and benefit from these.
The issue isn’t whether “the far left” exists in large numbers in the abstract; it’s how platform design, moderation norms, and social incentives shape which views are amplified -- and which are penalized. On Bluesky, the boundaries of acceptable discourse are unusually narrow and strongly enforced, which predictably produces ideological clustering.
As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
> On Bluesky, the boundaries of acceptable discourse are unusually narrow and strongly enforced, which predictably produces ideological clustering.
This isn't in conflict with my original comment.
> As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
These aren't conspiracy theories, and they pre-date and extend beyond Bluesky. They are easily observable patterns in most modern news media and social media. For one, silos are much easier to advertise to. Follow the money, like everything else.
I’ve encountered the same rhetoric, tactics, and moral framing in offline activist spaces for years, long before Bluesky or current platform dynamics. Online platforms don’t invent this; they surface and concentrate it. The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
If anything, the mistake is treating the "reasonable", aspirational version as more real than the people who consistently show up, organize, and speak — and then assuming the most visible expressions must be "controlled opposition."
> I’ve encountered the same rhetoric, tactics, and moral framing in offline activist spaces for years, long before Bluesky or current platform dynamics. Online platforms don’t invent this; they surface and concentrate it.
Once again, we seem to be in agreement on this.
> The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
These things are not mutually exclusive. It's both, and people (and their bots) across the entire political spectrum are guilty of involvement.
When everyone they disagree with on anything substantive is an asshole, while accepting the same or worse behavior and tone if it aligns with their views, it's absolutely not "basic spam filtering".
From the left's perspective, the liberals deserve muting and are spam, and same from the other way around. It's siloed echo chambers everywhere.
Part of it is unrealistic expectations of users thinking they're right about their world views. But part of it is platforms making features that amplify the former.
>The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
Are they just disproportionately powerful then? Because the US does definitely have consistent far left trends and movements that overtake the mainstream. The OK hand gesture hysteria is maybe an evident example, but land acknowledgments? DEI statements? Fatphobia? Defund the police? All of these originate from far left positions.
No. Once again you're referring to liberals even if you don't know it.
You might be confused because several forces want you to be exactly that:
1) The right lumps/conflates everything from centrist liberal to far left as "the far radical left" with no in-between, which blurs many lines.
2) Center liberals who want a social media veneer they can feel good about will literally pose as leftists/marxists, but if you look at their other beliefs and behaviors (were they trying to sink Bernie, or not?) then it becomes immediately obvious they're ultimately loyal to the Dem party, and that means center liberals serving capital interests.
But I can't blame you or anyone else for falling for the above unless you've seen enough to know, like following both of Bernie's presidential runs and how he was systematically smeared by both liberals and their corporate media.
Identity politics / DEI / etc are a liberal obsession. Class politics is the focus of the actual far left.
You can take the stance that nobody knows what any of these terms mean I guess, but then the picture gets kind of absurd, left-wing materialism loses all meaning, the church loses all relationship with the right, hell, from that standpoint Donald Trump campaigned as a leftist I guess? He did have a recurrent discourse around jobs and the working class.
> You can take the stance that nobody knows what any of these terms mean I guess
It's not that they don't know. It's that they bend definitions to their advantage depending on what the context dictates. 538 is exactly the kind of outlet one would expect to do such a thing.
It seems the left-right spectrum serves better to confuse than to differentiate, and that the most productive discussions unfold when we talk issues instead.
I can moderate my own feed -- the majority of people don't need, want, or enjoy an overtly paternalistic hugbox, and especially if moderation tends to be unidirectionally skewed in one political direction. It's not surprising that growth is slow.
On one side, sure, there's "overly paternalistic" moderation, but, on the other, there's AI powered revenge porn running rampant, so I'd argue there should be at least some moderation.
Calling a juvenile bikini edit "AI-powered revenge porn" is incorrect by definition. Revenge porn involves the non-consensual distribution of real, explicit sexual imagery of an identifiable person with the intent to cause harm.
Lumping sophomoric image edits into that category is exactly the kind of moral and definitional inflation being actively used to manufacture pretext for suppressing speech under the guise of "moderation."
You're right, we must be accurate in our terms, but that misclassifcation isn't worse than the act itself. The generation of deepfake non-consensual sexual images isn't revenge porn, because the woman in the image didn't even given initial consent. It being used to harass women is still a problem and is the sort of thing that requires moderation. It's not "sophomoric", it's exploitative and, in some states, illegal.
You’ve agreed this isn’t revenge porn. The case for moderation must stand or fall under the correct classification.
Harm has not been demonstrated. Annoyance or offense is not injury, and discomfort is not exploitation. Without evidence of systematic, material harm -- and without showing that enforcement would not introduce greater error and speech suppression -- the justification for moderation fails. Vague claims of illegality are irrelevant. A non-explicit image edit is not criminal in any US jurisdiction absent additional elements such as explicit sexual content, fraud, extortion, or targeted harassment; invoking “illegal in some states” -- without naming conduct and statute -- is just noise.
"Put them in a bikini" is closer to low-effort mockery than to any recognized category of sexual harm. The level of alarm being applied here is grossly disproportionate to the act itself and is merely being used as a pretext for broader intervention.
> invoking “illegal in some states” -- without naming conduct and statute -- is just noise.
Ok, sure[1]. I don't know why I am, but I'm surprised people are going to bat for this. Where is your line, exactly? Is it legality? Is it further along?
That article doesn’t contradict the point. The relevant laws hinge on explicit sexual content, nudity, or sexual acts, plus specific elements like intent or reckless facilitation. A non-explicit "put them in a bikini" image does not meet that threshold on its own. If prosecutors continue to argue otherwise, that theory will have to survive First Amendment scrutiny. I wish them the best of luck in that endeavor and look forward to its resolution.
>> The level of alarm being applied here is grossly disproportionate to the act itself and is merely being used as a pretext for broader intervention.
> I don't know why I am, but I'm surprised people are going to bat for this. Where is your line, exactly? Is it legality? Is it further along?
If something is illegal, that’s a clear boundary and the appropriate place for enforcement. If it’s legal, the burden is on anyone arguing for restriction to explain why speech controls are justified despite that -- what concrete harm exists, why existing law is insufficient, and why the remedy won’t create more error or suppression than it prevents.
Absent that showing, "this feels bad" or "this is alarming" isn’t a standard.
These are from posts/follows/likes. According to their CTO, about that same number of accounts on top of that don't do any of that and just visit/read the site.
I'm not sure about that. I'd rather decide for myself what I want to read and what I do not. I'd love to not delegate this important decision to corporate overlords.
Do you have some reference? The one (rather simple/incomplete) that I could find at : https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/erectile-... shows that overall ED dropped, maybe it is different for young men but would be curious to see an actual study.
reply