Short form content platforms aren’t going anywhere, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are just a carbon copy of tiktok. No problems with them, of course, because they’re American.

Currently in Tokyo from UK, paid for an Airalo esim before I arrived, and I was pretty impressed with how cheap and easy it’s been- and that’s with 20gbs data, which I’ve barely used.

My service provider O2 would have charged me £7 a day with their O2 travel bolt-on, but would have still been my usual contract of unlimited calls, texts and data, just that the data would have been throttled a fair bit. This is a lot more reasonable than it used to be, but still would have amounted in a large bill compared to the one off $18 esim.

I mean, they already have Easter, and then basically the whole month of December. It’s not anyone else’s fault that it got turned into a consumerism and capitalist mega payday.

Eh, your democrats in the US are Conservative to Europe. Your “left wing” is pretty much on par with our right wing.

Sure, those are good examples of negatives, but that is just the way of it. This happens all the time when new technology emerges. Just think about the audio industry, all of a sudden people could produce music from their spare bedrooms- jobs weren’t needed anymore. But the music industry is now far more saturated than ever as a result, as it is so much more accessible to people, without the need for specialist equipment and stacks of cash.

Not OP, But, Stephen Hawking could have kept his voice, as an example.There are probably lots of beneficial uses of this technology. Automatic TTS voice messages would be another 🤷‍♂️

Didn’t this exact scenario happen with Kim Jong Un playing golf in North Korea? (I mean, I know that’s their general shtick anyway, but still)

The man has dementia. Like, pretty far along, too. At this point, he’s just being used as a MAGA figurehead because they fed the beast of the US right wingers far too much that they backed themselves into a corner.

People can sue him into oblivion until his handlers finally accept he’s unfit, which they can’t do.

As a non-American, it’s fun to watch play out. I fully believe people will try to ‘weekend at bernies’ him into office if it comes to it.

As a non-american, I have suspicions about this whole anti-tiktok agenda that seems to be going on. I was against tiktok at first, and think it’s awful for fuelling that addictive/dopamine social media system. But now that I have my interests firmly in it, i learn a lot about my hobbies from it nice and quickly. However, Instagram reels is the exact same model, is that up for banning too? The excuse of it being Chinese spyware over Meta’s own homegrown US spyware is another aspect, however all these companies already have our data anyway…

Tinfoil hat, but I think this is entirely about media control. Nations are beginning to realise that they can no longer control narratives if the population can just go and see all the other perspectives online- if they can apply critical thinking and parse through whats real or fake. But most of the awful things happening in Gaza right now have been pushed by insta, tiktok, twitter, etc. The panic that the narrative can no longer be controlled on global political events like this is exactly why country leaders and politicians would be concerned.

Yeah, I did say someone recently told me this was a feature. I’ll find some time at the weekend to make the switch, it’s really far past time now I think.

I use Chrome, but Firefox on my android phone. I have had ublock origin installed since the beginning. I only really use it because I manage my YouTube and Google accounts through it, and its handy for sending tabs between my macbook and PC, as well as the various other workflow features I’ve come to rely on over the last decade or so.

Though I recently heard this was a feature on Firefox now. I used to use Firefox prior to chrome, about 15 or so years ago. I’ve been intending to switch back recently but haven’t got round to it yet.

Oh my god, I’ve been using ublock for as long as I can remember and had no idea about this! Thank you, now I just have to figure out what I’m doing.