I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
Jonathan Haidt is someone who nobody should take seriously. Pretty much all of the data he cites is cherry-picked and the vast majority of people in trust and safety and similar will tell you that he is probably one of the least reliable authorities on this subject. He's aiming to sell fear, not to actually solve the problem.
What do you mean? Nylon and polyester can be extremely durable, that’s always been their appeal. A knitted pocket is very likely to be a BIFL item even moreso than typical cotton or wool fabrics unless they’re specifically designed to be hard wearing, like canvas. That and the fact that it’s designed to fit any size and model of phone means it’s likely to be significantly less wasteful than putting your phone in a high end leather case that will age out when you upgrade.
Apple is clearly trying to experiment with more textile elements on its products, like with the Apple Watch band and FineWoven/tech woven cases to move away from using environmentally damaging leather and cheap feeling silicon. Stuff like this, sold in small lots, is how you test out whether people are into it before trying to work it into a product meant to sell to hundreds of millions of people.
Hey now. If they allowed you to simply enjoy the stuff you have without butting in to remind you of everything you don’t have, you might actually feel a moment of lightness and happiness. If they want you spending money they need to cultivate feelings of covetousness, inadequacy, or fear. Contentment doesn’t sell.
Yeah Apple’s evolution over the past decade has been very frustrating and disappointing to see. It seems like whatever scraps remain of the company’s core values now exist solely with a handful of old heads at the company and will likely not survive their retirements.
A lot has changed in the tech industry, but the rapidity of hiring and expansion of headcount just seems to have engendered a broad homogenization of business strategies, design conventions, and product vision. I think they started hiring people based on narrow defined ideas about skills and resumes to fit certain roles and they all end up shuffling the same bunch of people around across the same incestuous company hiring pipelines until they’re all doing stints at every company and driving them in the same broad direction.
Surely the fact that the current ruling party has an influential faction who explicitly reference Nazi Germany as an ideal worth striving for is relevant to setting the current moment in historical context. Yes we're not LITERALLY Nazi Germany for a variety of reasons but that doesn't mean it doesn't paint a picture of what they want to do, regardless of how successful they will be or what that will look like in practice.
Personally I think the most apt historical comparison is the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, but since we don't LITERALLY live in the Middle Ages and have ethnic divisions between Greeks and Latins one might say that's not a relevant comparison either.
> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
When the ridiculous approvals process blocks good apps and fails to block shovelware from flooding the platform I think people have plenty of reasons to complain it’s not working well.
For the most part Apple is in a bind of their creation here. They don’t want to surrender the cut of money they get from the App Store so they’re overly permissive about exploitative casino games and scams as long as they have in-app purchases. But they DO want to have standards, so they enforce standards on the books somewhat arbitrarily and it ends up falling on normal apps that just have some kind of functionality that hits an unknown third rail.
And even worse, there is an informal two-tiered system where companies like Meta and Amazon and Netflix can almost flagrantly violate App Store policies and mostly get away with it because of high demand for keeping the app in the store and because they have legal teams that will sue.
It would be better if they had an actual two-tiered system where developers with a track record of being good (defined however) can get a non-transferable “hunting license” to fast track approval and get more sensitive API privileges. But they’ll never do that either, because companies like Meta absolutely would not earn the privileges but demand them anyway.
They stacked almost ALL the actual stuff, like the camera system, SOC, etc. inside that little plateau and the rest of the slab is basically just display and battery. If I was going to make a clamshell phone, experimenting with miniaturizing and arranging the whole thing into a small corner of the footprint would be where I’d start.
It’s pretty instructive to compare an iPhone to a consumer product that’s priced for affordability first, like a Nintendo Switch. The differences in build quality are very evident.
The screens could definitely break, they were just very small so the likelihood that they would suffer an impact that would break them was comparatively small. In fact, the reason for the flip form factor was to protect the increasingly fancy displays when it’s in your pocket. They also didn’t weigh very much so they didn’t fall as hard.
Modern phones are extremely sturdy, people are just more precious about them because they’re much fancier and more expensive and more of a requirement for everyday life.
This tends to happen a lot with news of regulatory policies in the global south where Western commentators will hold them to standards of libertinism that don’t even really apply in their own countries. It’s some combination of ignorance about what the regulatory environment actually is at home and a certain condescending assumption that OUR regulators are fair minded and competent but THEIR regulators must all be corrupt incompetents with an authoritarian streak.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
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