For me, I would choose computer viruses.
I’m not overly keen on the 15 seconds micro-content that sites like TikTok and YouTube (shorts) are pulling. It creates the most densely packed, quickly paced content I’ve seen and it feels like people are now addicted to quick bursts of info.
It feels like that type of content is doing to reduce people’s already awful attention span, I’ve already had mates who can’t read threads, articles and comments because it’s too slow, terrible
Massively depends on the content/channel/algorithm though. My friend definitely uses TikTok as a dopamine dispenser for arguably mindless content. On the other hand I’ve gotten into a sort of mental health improvement/acknowledgment/acceptance of things type of TikTok where I feel like I’m taking a way a lot of small useful insights, even though the videos are only 30-60 seconds long. I keep a note on my phone with the takeaways I’ve had.
Blockchain technology hasn’t contributed anything of lasting value, and too much money, energy, and good will has been burned by people trying.
Its most popular applications are cryptocurrencies, which are used for gambling, money laundering, and for collecting payments from ransomware victims. Someone once bought a pizza with them, but since that time their transactions have become too slow and their value too volatile to exchange them for anything so concrete.
Various attempts have been made to use blockchain technology for public or shared databases, but it turns out to be worse than all the other faster and much simpler existing solutions in that space.
Others have attempted to bolt it on to various business and social systems, but it hasn’t provided any practical benefit there either. It remains a slow and cumbersome alternative to every problem.
Its unique superpower is that it can be used to make contracts between parties that have no trust in one another and no social or legal system of enforcement, so long as your definition of a contract is sufficiently narrow, can be reduced to terms understood by the world’s slowest logic engine, and is perfectly encoded the first time around and doesn’t require any adjustment thereafter. If one or more of those conditions fail, you’ll find yourself turning to the social and legal systems of enforcement you thought you didn’t have.
Someone once bought a pizza with them, but since that time their transactions have become too slow and their value too volatile to exchange them for anything so concrete.
I wish we could go back to the time when bitcoin was this crazy new currency and not a vessel for pump-and-dump schemes. It seems like such a cool idea, and I’d totally be on board with it due to the decentralization aspect (like I am with the fediverse) if it actually managed to be what it set out to be
It was never very suited as a currency, if by currency you mean a convenient medium of exchange. If by currency you mean a convenient medium of speculation and money laundering, I think it can be argued that was always the idea.
Well, technically, it is decent at being a currency even by your definition, just not in our society. I do think in something like a post apocalyptic world crypto would be a pretty good payment method, provided the technology worked to an extent where it would be possible to maintain.
I also refuse to believe it was invented to be speculative, I think it was basically a thought exercise to see if you could make a digital currency in a world where you can’t trust anyone.
Though the fact that right now it’s an unregulated currency that can be exchanged for regulated currency does allow for some pretty spectacular scams.
Data mining / big data / ads
I think it depends on the context though. Data mining of environmental sensors might yield valuable insights. Mining anonymized medical data could improve chances of catching a disease early, etc.
Agree on ads though. Nothing like having pharmaceutical ads stuffed down my throat while trying to watch a speedrun or whatever.
And small businesses die because they aren’t able to get the word that they exist out without advertising.
organic, word of mouth, grassroots, community building
My friends and I share cool places we find with each other all the time.
Yes. Ads don’t pay that much anyway, Reddit makes something like $10 per user per year. That means that even with a $1 subscription per user they’d be ahead. It’s the same for Youtube celebrities, they make their money from merchandise, Patreon and sponsorship deals, Youtube pays only a few dollars per thousand views even in ideal circumstances, even if a video has millions of views, you might only make a few thousand off it, and how many million view videos can a person realistically make?
We could probably replace the entire ad industry with something like $10 monthly divided among whichever sites we want to support.
Also, I get the argument that some people can’t afford $10 because of where they are, but then the ads being served to those people aren’t bringing any money in either, so you can adjust the cost downward.
Fire. We weren’t ready and it’s all been downhill since then.
Social media recommendation algorithms. They are too good at showing people what they want to see. They are largely at fault for causing social media to devolve into echo chambers and radicalizing people.