I joined Plex after I already needed to have a login to plex.tv to be able to stream. I understand that that already was problematic, but Plex was leagues ahead of its competition in terms of ease of adding users, as well as polish. You must be forgetting how awful Jellyfin was in comparison, even just 5 years ago. I’ve been keeping up on Jellyfin and it’s amazing how far they’ve come. Now Jellyfin has great theme options, a simple-to-install skip intro/outro plugin, an app option with built-in jellyseerr integration, decent collections support (still needs some work here on feature parity with Plex, but it’s on the way) and with Wizarr, onboarding new users is as easy as sending an invite link, just like Plex. All this came in the last 5 years, and were pretty much requirements for my use cases.

Sure you can say that I’m picky, but Plex really was the best option until like, this year. I started to accept the need to switch when they added the social media aspect to it. They completely ignored what their users actually wanted. Since then, they’ve been making worse and worse decisions, which is crazy because now more than ever their competition has reached their level. Hell, by pushing all their users away, Plex is only going to accelerate the development on Jellyfin.

Been on Plex for years, I will be fully migrated to Jellyfin by the end of the week

They aren’t worried about adblocking, but the cookie/tracker blockers that come with adblockers. They gotta know everything about you ya know

Looks like an email

I have been saving that one for when I get a framework laptop

All my hostnames are after Zen Buddhist concepts, like shikaku, hongaku, mushin, wuwei, jiyu, etc. My printer is the only thing that breaks this trend, it is named pos

Still having customers. Groceries are a basic need, but fast food is a luxury most people are already wanting to cut back anyway. I have been a fan of McChickens for a long time due to them being so cheap. They don’t taste amazing, but they got the job done, and were pretty much the cheapest protein I could get without having to make something myself. Even now, without any additional price hikes, they are now $3.50 for a single McChicken in my area. I cannot justify spending that, so I have completely stopped going to McDonalds. Since all other fast food has already done this before McDonalds, I no longer eat any fast food. They’ve all lost the only quality that made them worth while. Anecdotally, most people I know who did eat fast food don’t anymore due to prices. The higher they go, the more customers they will lose.

The answer is yes and with significant effect. I just barely skimmed this article but this doesn’t seem to be focusing on the important factor: Algorithmic content feeds.

Modern day social media (things like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, X, etc.) Are all set up with one goal in mind: make as much money as possible. This in itself isn’t a problem depending on who you ask, but let’s pick one social media as an example and see why this eventually causes political polarization.

For this demonstration, I will pick Facebook, but this could just as easily be done with any free, ad-supported website/app.

Okay, so to reach their goal of getting as much money as possible, Facebook shows ads between posts. Companies pay Facebook to show those ads to people, with the promise that they will be shown to people that fit a demographic that would be interested in the product. When the ad is viewed by enough people, Facebook will stop running the ad unless the company pays again.

Now that we know how they make money, let’s look at how they ensure they get as many people to view as many ads as possible. This mostly boils down to a few metrics.

1. Time spent on the platform
2. Engagement (views, link clicks, comments, likes, messages, posts, etc.)

If you spend more time on Facebook, you will see more ads. To maximize time spent on the platform, Facebook keeps track of everything you do, both on their site and off. I won’t go into specifics here, but they utilize web cookies to keep track of your browsing history and things like app permissions to keep track of your location and what you do on your phone. From this data, and potentially other data on you that they purchase from data brokers, they build a pretty good profile on what you would be interested in seeing. They show you relevant ads and relevant posts to hopefully keep you on their site.

Keeping engagement high means you are more likely to click on an ad, which pays out more than a view for an ad. To ensure you are fully engaging with content, as discussed above, Facebook keeps track of what you like to view and interact with, and puts that in front of you. However, Facebook also knows what type of content garners more interaction.

This is where the whole system leads to political polarization. There are two types of content that bring the most engagement: Controversy and content designed to make you angry. So what does Facebook do? It throws the most controversial, rage-baity article that makes your political opponents seem like absolute monsters in front of you. Often times, these posts are actually really misleading and full of both deliberate misinformation or non-malicious misinformation. These posts get people riled up, and so they are very likely to engage with the post. And because Facebook knows that you are less likely to stay on the site if it shows you something that you don’t engage with, it avoids showing you posts that show the other side of the story, so you are caught in an echo chamber of your own ideas and the misinformation of the outrage-inducing posts you have seen.

Facebook won’t show you posts that are on situations where you and your political opponents actually agree, because if it doesn’t get you worked up, you aren’t likely to engage with it. They also won’t show you posts that have a majority of engagement from your political opponents, since it’s likely not something that the data profile they have on you suggests you’d like.

News content that shows both sides agreeing is already hard to find, considering that the news sites also know that rage-inducing content gets more views and more eyes on their ads, so they primarily focus on making controversial content anyway.

Enough of this over time will make you think that everyone on the Internet agrees with you, since Facebook doesn’t show you content that those who oppose your ideas are engaging with. This type of situation will support an us-vs-them mentality, and breeds pockets of the social media with either left-leaning content or right-leaning content is all that’s being shown, which breads political polarization.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, sorry it was so long.

tl;dr: Social media exists to make their owning companies money, politically polarizing content gets them more money, thus in a way social media exists to make politically polarizing content

I don’t have the space for a home gym, but I do use my money and time I save from my commute to pay for and use a gym subscription. Also easily the best shape physically and mentally I have ever been