They want a backdoor so they can use it, but so can everyone else if they know where it is. In some ways, that makes it worse than having no encryption at all because it gives you the illusion of safety when in reality, if people know how to jiggle the handle of your door the right way, they can walk right into your living room at any time.

Very true. I was just saying that you can also blame enshittification for it going down like it has as well. Burning the candle at both ends and all that.

This brings up an interesting point because my first thought when I read “inundated with sexualized media their whole lives,” my first thought was, “In this Puritan culture?!” On the one hand, ads are all about using sex to sell products, while on the other, advertisers want nothing to do with anything that isn’t ‘kid friendly’ content. You just need to look at how sanitized the internet has become by corporations to see that at work.

But I think there’s something to be said there, and I think it goes deeper than just “the kids these days live in a Godless society of homosexual perverts” or whatever. I think the normalization of sex and availability of information about sex and sexuality has probably influenced it. I’d also say that the current state of the world and the stress of daily life have as much of an influence on this as the amount of sexualized media in their everyday lives. It’s been a noticeable thing with Milennials having less sex and fewer kids from stress, both financial and otherwise, and I see no reason that wouldn’t continue to trickle down to other generations. And even the amount of media out there, regardless of type, has just as much of an effect. If you have books to read and movies to watch, you’re less likely to pop out kids accidentally because you were bored and got frisky.

But how do you keep making the line go up, especially in a “market” with such a guaranteed drop-off point in user retention? You can do what these companies do and fill your apps with bots to keep engagement metrics up and users coming back as they fail to date your fake users. I’d call that enshittification, and it probably makes everything worse in this case.

Is Gen Z becoming the new Millennials?

“Gen Z is ruining the Dating App Market!”

I might be wrong (obligatory I am not a lawyer), but I think the laws either make it so that they can’t be considered as an accomplice to a crime like that, or they’re a corporation, which means that fines are really the only way they can be punished.

Either way, the arbitration clause, I believe, means that you can’t take them to court like that in any situation. An out of court settlement is your only option, except in the case of a class action lawsuit, which let’s them get a bulk deal on how much they have to pay out.

No, I believe the argument they’re making is if someone else posts your private information on BlueSky (think Kiwifarms doxxing gay people and sending that info to Christian hate groups), and BlueSky moderation doesn’t take action against the account posting the info, and then somebody uses that information to find and attack you, then BlueSky is culpable in the attack because they could’ve done something, but didn’t.

A better example, I think, would be the recent issue with known transphobe Jesse Singal and his followers, who came to BlueSky around a month ago and immediately began posting bigotry and false info. When reported to the moderation team, they did nothing about it (he actually got banned by the auto-mod and then manually unbanned during that period, but that’s another story). If he were to do something like my example, posting a trans person’s private information online and telling his followers to harass them, and BlueSky did nothing to remove the posts or his account, then they’d be legally culpable for enabling anything that might happen to you. But under arbitration, you can’t sue them for it.