Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

@CatDragon I don't, but I'm curious: is this because of the current shortage? Or do you object to people taking it for weight loss in a world where Novo Nordisk (I just had to look that up) gets their manufacturing act together?

@dtgeek I would expect DDG to grow a bit, as some people who might not have been motivated to chose it over Google's invasive tracking are likely to not want AI answers pushing human content ever-farther down the page.

But I guess I'm an optimist.

@farooqkz

To my broad recollection, there's been a bunch of research on the subject, but since neither Freemo's post nor mine was really *about* that except tangentially, perhaps you'd find more satisfaction with a search?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=violence+video+games

For example, the first result from that seems to suggest views are mixed with regard to young people and violent video games.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/violent-video-games-and-young-people.

Of course, this runs into the issue of correlation vs causation, which is always thorny and won't be solved in a comment thread.

@freemo

@anildash Mena Trott!

All I had to see was "dollarshort.org," and it all came flooding back. Movable Type, Mena Trott, and the beginning of my career shift. Good times.

@freemo IIRC, obviously your statement is correct at one level. Many studies have shown pretty strongly that there's no causal link between, say, violent video games and real-life violence. But I think the relatively-recent rise in anti-Asian violence (a subject near and dear to my heart) points to a much subtler effect.

My hypothesis is that when X number of isolated people harbor anti-Asian hatred (for example), but all of society is collectively telling them that's wrong, they mumble and grumble and keep their hatred to themselves, but when that same number of people are no longer isolated, but find themselves supported in large numbers by something like a large online community, a prominent political leader, or both, well, clearly the mask comes off, and the violence becomes very real.

This is why people are rightly (IMO) worried about the limits of speech on the internet.

Another example: there have been people angry at the government for decades, but it seems like it took Facebook connecting them and feeding them information they wanted to see about how to act on that hate, plus a prominent political leader spouting related nonsense, for them to travel to Washington DC and try to overthrow the government.

Seeing hateful nonsense isn't going to turn you or me into a hateful person. It isn't going to turn anyone who isn't already hateful into a hateful person. But leaving it available provides a very thin patina of credibility, and since information on the internet is not generally divorced from the people posting it, it also provides a means of social connection when left in place.

One angry hateful person is a person. Angry hateful people online are literally the basis of a violent armed mob.

This is why I'm actually finding myself more and more against an "anything goes" policy online, while still very strongly supporting free speech in person.

If you're willing to stand on a street corner and speak what you believe is true, anybody that is willing to be seen associating with you can do so, and I don't think anybody should interfere. If you want to print a crank newsletter and pass it out, go ahead. In this is freedom!

But it takes nothing, less than nothing, to post nasty stuff online, where it lives side-by-side in the same interface with good information, granting it that very thin patina of credibility I mentioned, and associations are anonymous or hidden until it's too late.

I don't think that's so simple. I think all of this [waves at everything] demonstrates that.

@nataliedavisgdread I mean, I generally don't know what else the purpose of the ads could be. So either the people running them are too stupid to realize how misguided their ads are, which... I mean... let's be honest, is probably the answer.

OR most of us in western countries are already well aware that *Jesus* gets us. It's all those churches filled with people who think hate-filled right-wing politics is somehow something Jesus would appreciate that are the problem. So thanks for spending money to highlight the stark difference between Christ and many Christians, rich birth-control-denying artifact thieves!

@nataliedavisgdread NPR says the purpose of the ads is to get "marginalized people" to appreciate Jesus. But what if, and hear me out, what if they instead have the effect of making Christians--who should already know Jesus, at least in theory--realize we should stop being so terrible to "marginalized people"? Maybe even by starting to see them less as "marginalized" and more as people.

Just a crazy thought.