The web has walked a tightrope for the past two decades. Like a car that's accelerated to 300 miles per hour, there's an alternate reality where the road keeps going straight and doesn't crash. But, its unlikely, and I'm afraid we've driven off the road, irrevocably.
The idea that the internet is just a "town square" except "everyone on the planet" simply does not work. Period. Human behavior was never designed to scale like that; we can't handle the discourse, we can't handle using that power responsibly, or internalizing what we read responsibly.
Many are afraid of a rogue AI taking over the world. The internet, and social media specifically, is that AI. Every human is a neuron, programmable by exploiting flaws in human evolution, or even self-programmable by living in feedback bubbles where their own fears and doubts are amplified. Every human is an actor; capable of traumatic harm by executing on that programming and, say, storming the capital.
Even my fears about this reality we live in are a byproduct of the programming I've received via the sites I visit, and the feedback bubbles I decide to live in online.
I cannot believe that my programming, and the programming many of the people in this Hacker News bubble receive every day, is any more or less dangerous to the fabric of society than the programming the people on Parler received. I'm angry at what transpired in the Capital and on Parler. I'm angry at AWS, Google, and Apple for reacting the way they did. I'm scared that something like that could happen to the products I'm working on, even though that's crazy because I work on dumb data entry and not social media for revolutionists. My fear and anger comes from reactions to actions taken by other people who were scared and mad; their fear and anger came from reactions to actions taken by the left, from the right, from the left, from the right, this is the feedback bubble; not between revolutionists on Parler, but between Us and Them. Because, it is Us and Them; it shouldn't be, but it always has been. The comments I've seen here over the past few days just confirm this; Parler gets shut down then hacked, by-and-large we applaud it.
I think about the idea of the Great Filter, and I wonder if what we're seeing here is the most likely filter for civilization. What happens when you give a billion products of survival-focused evolution the ability to talk to each other, with no limits, filters, or self-control? What happens to society? I want to believe that, if a Filter exists, its at least something outside our control like a virus, or its something we did to ourselves like global warming. But, maybe its actually just Us. Maybe products of evolution can never work together well enough to reach any stage of science-fiction like enlightenment.
I no longer believe there's any course a company or government could take to stop this. Its happening too fast, and by the time anyone in power realizes how much damage this has done, and is doing, to our society, it will be too late. At the very least, we need to shut down Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, and every other platform which allows peer-to-peer broadcast-like communication between everyone on the planet. Even the act of me posting this and you reading it is part of the problem. But, that won't happen in the west.
I suppose the only course of action I can take is to remove myself from the equation. If everyone did that, then the world would be a better place. Not everyone will, but its the only step I'm capable of. I guess, to some degree, it was fun while it lasted.
It'll probably still be very difficult to find physically, as it only had one limited release and that sold out almost instantly.
Fortunately, if you're not interested in the digital PS4 copy, you can purchase a DRM free download from their itch.io [1] which works on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Its a game that would run on a toaster, so not having a gaming computer isn't a barrier.
I think the critical component to this conversation that its important to stay focused on is not Apple's removal of Parler, but their continued insistence on maintaining exclusive control over what people install on their devices.
Apple should have the right to control what they distribute through their app store; this is undeniable in my mind. A reasonable, though not as obviously sound, argument could be made that at some level of scope and scale its alright to sell general purpose hardware limited to one operating system which delegates control over executable code to the manufacturer. I believe its also clear that Apple is far past any values of scope and scale where this is reasonable for them, specifically.
No one in these comments is talking about Google. Same thing happened with Fortnite; the conversation is all about Apple. This is a signal that the issue here really isn't their decision to allow or ban specific apps; its the core platform decision to allow or ban application distribution channels.
I think (but not sure) this thread was combined from multiple separate threads, some of which were only about Apple or Google or Amazon's actions. It seems like several threads with a few hundred comments each disappeared, and this one with 2k comments appeared out of nowhere.
That might explain why it looks like all of the comments are about one or the other.
Yes, I believe that's what happened here. Very poor decision by the mods; the Google/Apple ones make sense to merge, but the AWS one is a very different issue, and could have a far more interesting technical discussion about migration paths.
> their continued insistence on maintaining exclusive control over what people install on their devices
Think of iOS devices like gaming consoles with a GSM chip and you'll have a better analogy.
You can't install your own software on an Xbox, Playstation or Switch without going through some hoops. Neither can you get any random piece of software in their stores without complying with their rules.
> Imagine if MS could do this back in the 90s on Windows, would that have been acceptable?
It was not acceptable and they were forced to display a browser selection pop-up, on a OS that already freely allowed users to install whatever browser they wished.
Contrast this with Apple's iOS, where they somehow get away with not allowing any other browser engine than Safari's Webkit.
> It was not acceptable and they were forced to display a browser selection pop-up, on a OS that already freely allowed users to install whatever browser they wished.
In Europe. I once tried to uninstall IE in 2005, and it was a complete comedy of errors that lead to me re-installing Windows.
I understand this logic but my worry is since smartphones have become the primary computing device for millions of people ("What's a computer?") treating them as closed systems like gaming consoles is a bad approach.
I think what's better for the consumer, and society in general I suppose, is to treat them as general computing devices. Especially as we see them converge with PCs (e.g. tablets with keyboards replacing laptops).
Consider the following: If you had to pick only one, would you replace your PC with a gaming console, or a smartphone? I worry the vast majority of people would choose the smartphone, and as such we would have replaced the open PC culture we have now with a closed, proprietary culture.
Game consoles are the exact reason why I included the line about "at some values of scope and scale".
I do feel they're an interesting analogue; they sell hundreds of millions of units, the scale is there, but why do I, if no one else, hold them to a different standard than phones? At the end of the day, I do hold them to a different standard, even if I don't have a fully logical argument for why.
I'm satisfied enough with three reasons, though none represent a fully logical argument.
First, they have very limited scope. Every game console does one thing: play games. Some game consoles do a second thing: watch movies and tv. There are platform features to support those goals (parties, voice chat, friends, etc), but that's effectively it.
In comparison, phones have undefined potential scope. They're used for everything anyone could need computing for, usually only limited by the screen size, input systems, processing power, and in the iPhone's case, Apple's 2010s attitude about what your phone is for.
Second, that limited scope described above is wholly "non-critical infrastructure". I love gaming; definitely more than most people. I have a Series X and a PS5 sitting next to my TV, while I'm typing this on a PC with a RTX 2070. Gaming can lead to some very powerful, life-changing moments for some people, and its been a godsend during this pandemic for many. But, its still Just Gaming.
I would define both Communication and News, among others, as computing scopes which are critical infrastructure; these are both things people use their phones for, and they're both scopes which Apple has a demonstrated history of assaulting on the iPhone.
Third, there's very little conversation from actual stakeholders concerning game consoles changing. I try to keep apprised with the games industry, and by extension how game developers feel about the major platforms; the discussion about Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo opening their platforms simply isn't happening. While they do have final control over what is allowed to be played on each console, even with the physical disc market, there's very few incidents of them abusing that control to restrict distribution of a game that desired distribution on each console. There certainly are games which haven't even attempted approval and would be shut down (steam has many anime porn games like this), but the problem certainly isn't as severe as on iOS (due to the limited scope, combined with specialized development skillset, combined with individual investment necessary to get a game working on each platform, I imagine).
There's a second argument, the Fortnite one, that secondary marketplaces aren't just necessary for freedom of speech, but also for revenue. All of these companies force games to use their IAP frameworks, which I'm sure takes something around 30%. Its definitely strange to me that Epic railed against Apple for the same policies they accept freely on Xbox, PS4, and Switch, and I have a less cogent explanation for this; either (1) they should be fine paying that tax to gain access to the platform, or (2) they shouldn't be, and thus should take issue with every platform exerting that control. Unfortunately, the reality is probably (3) Sony owns 2% of Epic, Epic cuts special deals with every platform, and those deals have kept them happy for now, despite not applying to the majority of game developers, and Apple is actually in the right on this specific issue in never giving special deals.
Its important to remember that the way Apple and Google treat game developers is, frankly, garbage. That previous statement I made about Apple never giving special deals actually isn't true: Amazon uses their own IAP framework for digital purchases on Kindle and Prime Video. Fortnite is definitely the same scale as these use cases, but they couldn't negotiate a special deal. Google allows applications to use whatever IAP framework they want (IIRC), but not Games; Games have to use Google's 30% tax IAP framework. Due to these policies, Google and Apple are both Top 5 "Gaming Companies" by revenue, despite not producing a single game. By comparison, real gaming platform holders (Sony, MS, Nintendo) negotiate all the time, and find middleground that keeps developers happy.
This conversation is, of course, happening every day with iOS. Nearly every app developer has a story about how Apple has slighted them. Most experience a weird review and recover from it. Some don't. Many have similar stories concerning Google and the Play Store, but its a far less interesting narrative because there are alternatives for Android users and developers. In fact, the best selling Android devices come with an alternative store pre-installed (Galaxy), all of the first-party apps on Samsung phones are distributed and updated through there (in other words, its users use it), and you can go download Fortnite there right now.
So, its not the "exact same". Its similar enough to where I keep an open mind, and I'm ready to join the cerebral fight for mindshare if the need for openness in consoles should occur, but I don't feel we're there yet. The first thing I'd need to see is actual game developers rally against a platform; maybe that isn't happening due to fear of retribution, but I think even considering that we'd be hearing anonymous rumblings, and I'm not even hearing that.
> I think the critical component to this conversation that its important to stay focused on is not Apple's removal of Parler, but their continued insistence on maintaining exclusive control over what people install on their devices.
This has been going on since the App store first launched. I remember speaking up about this years and years ago. There were two sides, and well, we know which side one: people just accepted that Apple gets to dictate what goes on the iPhone.
So at this point, I have no sympathy for anyone who suddenly realizes: "Hey, what are we doing? What are we allowing?"
Every cheered when Apple prevented Flash from running on the device. And then porn apps. And then cheap "flashlight" apps. Or apps that did nothing except cost $1000 for a JPEG of a red gem. Guess what? This is the end result.
So I always look for sincerity when people propose fighting back against this now. Because now that it affects them, they want a change, but do they really want change, or are they just being selfish. And it's always selfish. People are fighting for their piece of the pie.
The "fuck you, got mine" attitude.
> No one in these comments is talking about Google.
Google I can side load apps freely. Others can operate stores and do this. Google does not have this problem.
Well, if you're a corporation with dozens/hundreds of designers, who did a great job of building an extensible design system, and now any engineer can just take that design system and roll with it, what are you going to do? Fire all those designers?
Of course not. You simply re-design every few years.
The re-design will be supported by evidence like "its cleaner" and "it increases visual clarity" or "it unifies our brand", because phrases like that mean nothing but who would ever vote against cleaning something up?
Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is.
* iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives.
* WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users.
* Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2]
* Discord, 100M monthly actives [3]
* Slack, 12M daily actives [4]
* Teams, which is certainly more popular than Slack, but I shudder to list it because its stability may actually be worse.
The old piece of wisdom that "real-time chat is hard" is something I've always taken at face-value as being true, because it is hard, but some of the most stable, highest scale services I've ever interfaced with are chat services. iMessage NEVER goes down. I have to conclude that Slack's unacceptable instability, even relative to more static services like Jira, is less the product of the difficulty of their product domain, and moreso something far deeper and more unfixable.
I would not assume that this will improve after they are fully integrated with Salesforce. If your company is on Slack, its time to investigate an alternative, and I'm fearful of the fact that there are very few strong ones in the enterprise world.
I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack. I'm glad, Discord is a fantastic service in my experience. It's a shame they got shoe horned into a mostly gaming oriented service. I've never had a class or worked somewhere where Discord was a considered solution instead of Slack, but I can't think of anything that Slack does better (in my experience). In general, I think Discord has the best audio and video service that I've used, especially kicking Zoom to the curb.
Discord is definitely in the same realm of scale as Slack, and probably bigger (they publish different metrics, so its hard to say for sure).
The really impressive thing about Discord's scale is the size of their subscriber pools in the pub-sub model. Discord is slightly different than Slack in the sense that every User on a Server receives every message from every Channel; you don't opt-in to Channels as in Slack, and you can't opt-out (though some channels can be restricted to only certain roles within the Server, this is the minority of Channels).
Some of the largest Discord servers have over 1 million ONLINE users actively receiving messages; this is mostly the official servers for major games, like Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends.
In other words, while the MAU/DAU counts may be within the same order of magnitude, Discord's DAUs are more centralized into larger servers, and also tend to be members of more servers than an average Slack DAU. Its a far harder problem.
The chat rooms are oftentimes unusable, but most of these users only lurk. Nonetheless, think about that scale for a second; when a user sends a message, it is delivered (very quickly!) to a million people. That's insane. Then combine that with insanely good, low latency audio, and best-in-class stability; Discord is a very impressive product, possibly one of the most impressive, and does not get nearly enough credit for what they've accomplished.
For comparison; a "Team" in Microsoft Teams (roughly equivalent to a Discord Server or Slack Workspace) is still limited to 5,000 people.
I really agree Discord is amazing and wish I could use it for work instead of Slack.
I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model (even though I hate it when people use threads in Slack) and the whole everyone in every channel except for role-based privacy settings. The second one especially is a big deal because you can't do things like team-only channels without a prohibitive amount of overhead.
That said (with zero knowledge of their architecture) I have to feel like both of those missing features aren't too terribly hard to build. Its very likely Discord is growing as a business fast enough on the gaming and community spaces they don't feel the added overhead of expanding into enterprise (read: support, SLAs, SOC, etc) makes sense and are waiting until they need a boost to play that card.
> I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model
They do have a threading model now (if you are talking about replying to a message in a channel and having your reply clearly show what you are responding to). If you are talking about 1-on-1 chats with other people in your same server then yes, that is still lacking IMHO in discord. The whole "you have to be friends" to start a chat (or maybe that's just for a on-the-fly group) is annoying.
Discord gives every user an identity that is persistent beyond the server; you have a Discord account, not a server account. Slack does the opposite. Enterprises would hate Discord's model, as they prefer to control the entire identity of every user in their systems, such that when they leave the company they can destroy any notion of that identity ever existing.
Absolutely agree. I like the 1 main discord account but I wish I could have 1 "identity" per-server as well. I don't love that I am in some discords that I don't want tied to my real name and others where I've known these people for over a decade and would see in person multiple times a week (before the pandemic). I know you can set your name per-server but you can't hide your discord username (or make it per-server) which sucks.
Agreed completely. Discord has always been much smoother for me than Slack, and the voice/video chat quality is literally the best I've ever seen anywhere.
If they made their branding a bit more professional and changed the permission model from the (accurate) garbage you described to something closer to Slack then I think Slack would be doomed.
>I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack
Keep in mind you're comparing daily active users vs monthly active users. I'd guess most slack users are online weekday for pretty much the entire day (because it's for work and your boss expects you to be online), whereas a good chunk of discord users are only logging in a few hours a week when they're gaming.
Minecraft official server: 190k online users. | Fortnite official server: 180k online users. | Valorant official server: 170k online users. | Jet's Dream World (community): 130k online users. | CallMeCarson server (YouTuber): 100k online users. | Call of Duty official server: 90k online users. | Rust (the game) official discord: 80k online users. | League of Legends official server: 60k online users. | Among Us official server: 50k online users.
Their scale is insane. Even with their usage spiking during after-hours gaming in major countries, their baseline usage at every hour of the day, globally, makes it one of the most used web services ever created.
Slack's DAU and MAU numbers are probably pretty close to one-another. Discord's MAU/DAU ratio is probably bigger than Slack's. That just means that Discord is, again, solving a harder problem; they have much bigger (and more unpredictable) spikes in usage than Slack. Yet, its a far more stable and pleasant product.
Well for the real time side, I can't tell you how big a boon it's been to build our platform on top of Elixir/BEAM. Hands down the best runtime / VM for the job - and a big big secret to our success. Where we couldn't get BEAM fast enough - we lean on rust and embed it into the VM via NIFs.
2021 is the year of rust - with the async ecosystem continuing to mature (tokio 1.0 release) we will be investing heavily in moving a lot of our workloads from Python to Rust - and using Rust in more places, for example, as backend data services that sit in front of our DBs. We have already piloted this last year for our messages data store and have implemented such things as concurrency throttles and query coalescing to keep the upstream data layer stable. It has helped tremendously but we still have a lot of work to do!
To help scale those super large servers, in 2020 we invested heavily in making sure our distributed system can handle the load.
Did you know that all those mega servers you listed run within our distribution on the same hardware and clusters as every other discord server - with no special tenancy within our distribution. The largest servers are scheduled amongst the smallest servers and don't get any special treatment. As a server grows - it of course is able to consume a larger share of resources within our distribution - and automatically transitions to a mode built for large servers (we call this "relays" internally.) At any hour, over a hundred million BEAM processes are concurrently scheduled within our distributed system. Each with specific jobs within their respective clusters. A process may run your presence, websocket connection, session on discord, voice chat server, go live stream, your 1:1/group DM call, etc. We schedule/reschedule/terminate processes at a rate of a few hundred thousand per minute. We are able to scale by adding more nodes to each cluster - and processes are live migrated to the new nodes. This is an operation we perform regularly - and actually is how we deploy updates to our real time system.
I was responsible for building and architecting much of these systems. It's been super cool to work on - and - it's cool to see people acknowledge the scale we now run at! Thank you!! It's been a wild ride haha.
As for scale, our last public number perhaps comparable to Slack is ~650 billion messages sent in 2020, and a few trillion minutes of voice/video chat activity. However given the crazy growth that has happened last year due to COVID - the daily message send volumes are well over the 2 billion/day average.
Just anecdotal, but as someone who has used Teams continuously for 1.5 years, I can say that it has never been down for me.
That being said, individual instances of the app are notoriously unstable causing random annoyances. But, I am on a very early build of Teams, which is buggy by definition.
Slack and the others have different contractual guarantees and different regulatory environments. Comparing them is not really fair because the reality is that these other services probably just lose tons of messages and slack/teams can't do that! They have to have better guarantees.
That's kind of the definition of a service being up. :) I've experienced numerous "soft" outages which result in messages not sending and getting lost - and even more double sends, sometimes very distant from where the message was originally sent.
It isn't just # of users, though - SlackOps is probably unique to Slack in that list (minus Teams, I guess) - so # of messages per month is a better metric. Not that I'm letting Slack off the hook, it still may be that their codebase and/or dev process is just nasty.
And it is thus important to recognize that our cultural perception of book banning, book burning, etc as a bad thing isn't something intrinsic to humans, and its not something we got for free. It took years of effort from major authors and members of the literary community to shift that perception. And we need to fight that fight again for applications, and especially for platforms which give their users and developers no other recourse, on behalf of the vast majority of users who don't have the knowledge or context to understand why it matters.
While some people would blame it on Nintendo producing products people want, I think its a little more cultural than that: Nintendo, as a company, deeply fails to understand Western culture. Because of this decades-long misunderstanding, they've developed a weird culture of isolation with the west; far more-so than other Japanese game developers like PlayStation, who have a REALLY strong western corporate presence.
Though, I'd argue Nintendo's interactions with the west are really similar to another Japanese developer, From Software. They both have a massive, rabid western fanbase who orgasm at every bit of news these eastern companies hand out. Well, in the end, they give out very little, and a lot of their game releases follow a pattern of "we're making new game, here's a teaser trailer" (three years pass with literally nothing) "ok, game is out today, have fun". Contrast that to Cyberpunk and other western developers, which more follow a pattern of constant community engagement, developer diaries, release dates promised a year in advance, then missed, playable demos, marketing deal with Doritos, sponsored twitch streams, etc.
Its a rather interesting case study in how game companies should communicate with their base. You'd initially think that more communication is always better, but there's so much evidence to the contrary (Nintendo, From, Valve, and Team Cherry immediately come to mind). By rarely communicating these companies exempt themselves from a lot of criticism; obviously this exemption applies to the games they're developing, but it really does extend to everything they do.
If you watch the Engoodening of No Man's Sky on YouTube, it argues exactly this. Every thing that Hello Games' Sean Murray said ended up haunting him, and them stopping the communication and just getting to work is how NMS got to being one of the better space sims today.
I really haven't seen any card that has better net reward generation than Discover, if you want a "one card for maximum rewards". You can definitely earn more if you juggle cards, but the base discover card is really quite good as a one-card system, and I think would beat any "2%-3% on everything" card.
It does operate on 5% categories each quarter, but those categories tend to be really common and broad, and their systems aren't exactly the best at determining when something shouldn't be in a category. In 2021, their categories are (Grocery Stores, Walgreens, CVS), (Gas Stations, Wholesale Clubs, Streaming Services), (Restaurants, Paypal), and (Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Target.com). That's in addition to 1% on everything else.
Combine that with no annual fee (the BofA Premium Rewards card is $95/year, Sapphire Reserve is $550/year)... its very difficult to beat.
That being said, I'm a bigger fan of the Chase Freedom Unlimited or Flex, as I have everything else with Chase and I prefer keeping total "accounts to log in to" at a minium. The Flex has a rewards system similar to Discover, whereas the Unlimited is more static x% on Dining; they both get pretty close to Discover.
5% rotating category cards aren't that great IMO, it's a waste of your time tracking what the categories are. And if you add up the overall cashback percentage you're getting, it's likely going to be less than 2.65% unless you're spending more than 40% of your spending in those categories.
I feel that browsers should implement a permissions grant pop-up for when a site attempts to set a cookie with SameSite=none, and the cookie api can be extended to enable explanations to be given by the developer.
This essentially moved the banner into the browser, and will make will make ad networks tell websites to not use SameSite=none, but use SameSite cookies and tell those ad networks behind the scenes. There are plenty of ads now already that are seemingly first party hosted (and go as far as transmitting the ad content through e.g. websockets to avoid adblocker detection).
I can't speak for why Herman Li, or any other musician, would be banned for DMCA. But, its my understanding that Twitch pays for a live performance license from the major music publishers to enable musicians to stream on their platform [1]. Of course, this didn't work for Herman Li, but I think it at least speaks to their long-term goals for the platform.
Additionally, while they say to never play recorded music on stream, unless from a source where the copyrights are taken care of, their specific recommendations even in this "clarification" post are very opaque. Never play recorded music on stream, unless you own all the rights, but you probably don't, if you're not sure turn off your VODs. None of that is consistent with some overarching idea of why people get DMCA'd; would I get DMCA'd for playing recorded music live, but not having VODs? I would guess even Twitch doesn't know; its outside of their control.
In short, music on Twitch is REALLY risky, primarily because their rights enforcement is so immature. Its akin to them wildly shooting in the air with a machine gun. YouTube's Content ID is a bit more mature and predictable, so diversifying there may be a good idea.
The idea that the internet is just a "town square" except "everyone on the planet" simply does not work. Period. Human behavior was never designed to scale like that; we can't handle the discourse, we can't handle using that power responsibly, or internalizing what we read responsibly.
Many are afraid of a rogue AI taking over the world. The internet, and social media specifically, is that AI. Every human is a neuron, programmable by exploiting flaws in human evolution, or even self-programmable by living in feedback bubbles where their own fears and doubts are amplified. Every human is an actor; capable of traumatic harm by executing on that programming and, say, storming the capital.
Even my fears about this reality we live in are a byproduct of the programming I've received via the sites I visit, and the feedback bubbles I decide to live in online.
I cannot believe that my programming, and the programming many of the people in this Hacker News bubble receive every day, is any more or less dangerous to the fabric of society than the programming the people on Parler received. I'm angry at what transpired in the Capital and on Parler. I'm angry at AWS, Google, and Apple for reacting the way they did. I'm scared that something like that could happen to the products I'm working on, even though that's crazy because I work on dumb data entry and not social media for revolutionists. My fear and anger comes from reactions to actions taken by other people who were scared and mad; their fear and anger came from reactions to actions taken by the left, from the right, from the left, from the right, this is the feedback bubble; not between revolutionists on Parler, but between Us and Them. Because, it is Us and Them; it shouldn't be, but it always has been. The comments I've seen here over the past few days just confirm this; Parler gets shut down then hacked, by-and-large we applaud it.
I think about the idea of the Great Filter, and I wonder if what we're seeing here is the most likely filter for civilization. What happens when you give a billion products of survival-focused evolution the ability to talk to each other, with no limits, filters, or self-control? What happens to society? I want to believe that, if a Filter exists, its at least something outside our control like a virus, or its something we did to ourselves like global warming. But, maybe its actually just Us. Maybe products of evolution can never work together well enough to reach any stage of science-fiction like enlightenment.
I no longer believe there's any course a company or government could take to stop this. Its happening too fast, and by the time anyone in power realizes how much damage this has done, and is doing, to our society, it will be too late. At the very least, we need to shut down Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, and every other platform which allows peer-to-peer broadcast-like communication between everyone on the planet. Even the act of me posting this and you reading it is part of the problem. But, that won't happen in the west.
I suppose the only course of action I can take is to remove myself from the equation. If everyone did that, then the world would be a better place. Not everyone will, but its the only step I'm capable of. I guess, to some degree, it was fun while it lasted.