As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close. It's not that they are really bad, but I don't like monopolies. I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly. Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it's closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure. In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they'll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not. That's because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global), I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms' inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it's impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP's no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn't quite the thing. The platforms emerged because it's bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there's not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it. So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn't reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet. For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So: Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching. It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like "buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K". Or same for selling on a service you host. The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services. Shit, I wrote this again.

Just saw this article linked in a ThePrimeagen video. I didn't watch the video, but I did read the article, and all of this article is exactly what I'm always saying when I'm complaining about current UI trends and why I'm so picky about the software I use and also the tools I use to write software. I shouldn't have to be picky, but it seems like developers (professional and hobbyist alike) don't care anymore and users don't have standards.

I spent way too long researching the morning. That industry implies a much greater population that is attracted to children. Things get more nuanced. People are attracted to different stages, like prebubesant, early adolescence, and mid to late adolescence. It seems like an important distinction because this is a common mental disorder. I was ready to write this comment about my fear that there's a bunch of evil pedophiles living among us who are simply deterred by legal or social pressures. It seems more like the extreme stigma of pedophilia has prevented individuals from seeking assistance and has resulted in more child sexual abuse. This sort of disorder can be caused by experiencing this abuse at a younger age. When I was religious, we worked closely with an organization to help victims of trafficking. We had their stories. They entered our lives. I took care of some of these kids. As a victim of sexual abuse when I was kid, I had a hatred for these kinds of people. I feel like my brain is melting seeing how there is a high chance of people in my life being attracted to children. This isn't really to justify the industry. I'm just realizing that general harassing people openly about it might not be helping the situation.

Googlebot sad when disallowed access to 18+ videos

No but, you can just close it.

I bet every company has at least one employee with right-wing political views. Choosing a product based on some random quotes by employees is stupid.