There's a content creator I used to follow who said her outlook on social media changed the day she discovered that her 11 year-old nephew was an "edge-lord" on Twitter who was trolling at such a sophisticated level that it caused her to rethink every post that had ever provoked an emotional reaction.

Apparently he came across as articulate enough that she couldn't tell the difference between his posts and that of any random adult spewing their political BS.

This predated ChatGPT so just imagine how much trouble a young troll could get up to with a bit of LLM word polishing.

20 years ago it was common for people to point out that the beautiful woman their friend was chatting up is probably some 40 year-old dude in his mom's basement. These days we should consider that the person making us angry in a post could be a bot or it could be some teenager just trying to stir shit up for the lulz.

Dead Internet theory might be not be literally true, but there's certainly a lot of noise vs signal.

Better idea: instead of bending the entire internet to "protect the children", how about we just ban minors from the internet completely? It was never built for kids, its never been kid friendly to begin with. Minors cannot buy guns or vote, not get married, nor enter into contracts, yet tech companies get a free pass to engage with minors. Why? I think the the tech companies know exacty what minors do on their systems, they allow it and profit from it. Exploiting minors and bad parents. So instead of trying to change the whole internet, how about we keep the people who are responsible for the minors accountable: the parents.

If I start any kind of company, I cannot just invent new rules for society via ToS; rather the society makes the laws. If we just make a simple law that states minors are not allowed to access the web and/or access any user generated content (including chat), it won't need to be enforced by every site/app owner, it would be up to the parents.

The same way schools cannot decide certain things for your children (even though they regularly over reach...).

We need better parenting. How about some mandatory parenting classes/licenses for new parents? Silly right? Well its just as silly as trying to police the entire internet. Ban the kids from internet and the problem will be 95% solved.

It's open source software that runs on donations, so... yeah? https://xcancel.com/about

This reminds me of the time I was a young, naïve idiot, and decided I would learn GTK by writing some basic app in GTK. In x86 (not x86-64) assembly. Like all of my other project ideas from that era, never went anywhere, and I horribly underappreciated just how complicated things were.

Kudos for actually getting somewhere in their attempt to do this, a further state than I ever managed.

Designers who remove scroll bars and window borders so you can’t click and drag are computing’s version of a terrorist. It’s an active assault on performance.