Social media is mostly about what you make of it and how you interact to find value. This is the same in Twitter, TikTok, FB, Instagram, even LinkedIn.

If you don't interact with the product, you get lowest denominator crap.

This is not true for the major social media sites that control the algorithmic feeds. (Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, YouTube...)

While you may be able to add a small bend to the feed, it's really 90% in their power, not yours.

I'm looking at Facebook "Home" feed. Funny how they added a separate "Friends" feed, the original purpose of the site, that's not the default.

IDK, I still find my Facebook and Instagram feeds very topical and useful to me, so I keep using them. I also curate aggressively, have a wide variety of interests and a few hundred close connections. It could be that I am just fitting into what the algo is steering to, but I don't get the low quality stuff that OP is complaining about.

For Reddit, you can select an option so that it only shows you things from subs you follow. Dramatically improves the experience!

sure, but now it's giving me days old crappy posts with 3 votes from those subs as it leans wholeheartedly in the Dark Pattern of always feeding me something so I keep reflexively coming back for more.

Was curious what my abandoned FB shows if I log in now. Mostly posts from groups I joined ages ago that are surprisingly still active, some random local news articles, and ads for restaurants.

I used to run the Facebook page for a church-affiliated children's summer program associated with a minority group.

I accidentally switched to that account the other day.

The feed was the most right-wing, Fox News crap you could imagine!

I am both strongly pro 2A, and extremely liberal. Sometimes it gets things wrong, but I just use the feedback buttons and snooze content I don't agree with and it remarkably stays mostly on track for me.

I have a very sweet elderly friend of the family who only uses Facebook for church-related stuff, and since I'm "the tech guy" she asked me to look at her facebook and help her understand why she sees so much Trump, right-wing, hateful, violent, "Nazi-adjacent" (interestingly never -overtly- Nazi) stuff in her feed. I didn't have the heart to try to explain to her demographic bias, revealed preferences, and overlapping group interests, so I just said it's probably a software glitch in Facebook.

If I learned anything at Buy N Large University, AR screens in eyeware may be huge.

The issue with those inclined pillows with the arm hole in them is that they can be a really hard angle for a side sleeper to be at. It makes my back and hips hurt way worse than my shoulder.

You clearly did not live in the world of watching two teens on computers in the same room hold two entirely different conversations out-loud and over AIM.

56k was also unidirectional, you had to have special hardware on the other side to send at 56k downstream. The upstream was 33.6kbps I think, and that was in ideal conditions.

The special hardware was actually just a DSP at the ISP end. The big difference was before 56k modems, we had multiple analog lines coming into the ISP. We had to upgrade to digital service (DS1 or ISDN PRI) and break out the 64k digital channels to separate DSPs.

The economical way to do that was integrated RAS systems like the Livingston Portmaster, Cisco 5x00 seriers, or Ascend Max. Those would take the aggregated digital line, break out the channels, hold multiple DSPs on multiple boards, and have an Ethernet (or sometimes another DS1 or DS3 for more direct uplink) with all those parts communicating inside the same chassis. In theory, though, you could break out the line in one piece of hardware and then have a bunch of firmware modems.

The asymmetry of 56k standards was 2:1, so if you got a 56k6 link (the best you could get in theory IIRC) your upload rate would be ~28k3. In my expereience the best you would get in real world use was ~48k (so 48kbpd down, 24kbps up), and 42k (so 21k up) was the most I could guarantee would be stable (baring in mind “unstable” meant the link might completely drop randomly, not that there would be a blip here-or-there and all would be well again PDQ afterwards) for a significant length of time.

To get 33k6 up (or even just 28k8 - some ISPs had banks of modems that supported one the 56k6 standards but would not support more than 28k8 symmetric) you needed to force your modem to connect using the older symmetric standards.

Trackpad != trackpoint. The track point is the little eraser nub pointer embedded into the keyboard. Many thinkpad enthusiasts disable the trackpad entirely.

The doctors offices want none of it. It's all FoodTV and HGN.

There is no utility in pissing off 75% of your customers. I'm thrilled that my kid's doctor doesn't even allow patients that aren't vaccine schedule compliant.

Doctors should never deny patients.

They can take precautions & insist on proper treatments, of course.

It’s this attitude that’s led to us being in this mess. Don’t want to listen to the doctor about basic medical advice? Don’t go to that doctor.

Being medically stupid isn't a protected class. You can refuse service to anyone you want to otherwise. It's not an ER, it's a Pediatrician, and they value not endangering their other patients who actually follow medical advice.

I'm in Hell (FL), so more "professional offices" than not have Fox on.

Also, we are pushing hard to make sure kids aren't vaccinated at a state level it seems.

I wish I didn't have so much extended family in the area that I'd be moving away from if I left.

I firewall my TV from my Printer just so they don't get any ideas.

If its not in the middle east it's just a sparkling police action.

RC Cola, this is your moment to shine.