u/basafish

The tech companies realized that the more polarized, angry and negative content they push, the more profits they get. This led to everyday addictive live consumption of such media, the largest scale of society mass influence on people's minds in history. People are getting isolated and their emotions aren't even theirs anymore.

This is a problem we need to solve together, we have to realize it's a problem first and devise a solution. It might be helpful to devise a common framework to regulate algorithms. Companies cannot manipulate their huge data however they please. Data should be really something we have ownership of.

The tech companies realized that the more polarized, angry and negative content they push, the more profits they get. This led to everyday addictive live consumption of such media, the largest scale of society mass influence on people's minds in history. People are getting isolated and their emotions aren't even theirs anymore.

This is a problem we need to solve together, we have to realize it's a problem first and devise a solution. It might be helpful to devise a common framework to regulate algorithms. Companies cannot manipulate their huge data however they please. Data should be really something we have ownership of.

I literally woke up and saw $10 million in my account. I guess I'm a millionaire now. Of course, my first instinct was that I should withdraw it, but TikTok told me otherwise - withdraw it and the bank may call you a thief. So I kept it there. 10 minutes later, a guy called my number, said he's a South African billionaire, and spew a lot of jargon, I guess legal stuff and basically it causes trouble for him if I ever send it back, so "as long as you keep quiet, keep the money". Now I'm thinking maybe it's related to money laundering or some shady stuff.

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I can't count how many times the AI completely misunderstood my prompt, skipped important context or running unnecessary scripts because its chain of thoughts went the wrong way. By reading the thoughts and stopping it when it does, I was able to finish the tasks with 90% tokens less than when I didn't read it.

I can't count how many times the AI completely misunderstood my prompt, skipped important context or running unnecessary scripts because its chain of thoughts went the wrong way. By reading the thoughts and stopping it when it does, I was able to finish the tasks with 90% tokens less than when I didn't read it.

Social media algorithms (TikTok's For You page, Instagram Reels, YouTube's recommendation engine, X's timeline) have reshaped how billions of people think, vote, shop, and relate to each other in under two decades. I'd argue nothing else humans have built comes close in terms of speed, scale, and depth of societal transformation.

Speed: The printing press took centuries to meaningfully shift literacy and religious structures across Europe. Television took decades to become a dominant cultural force. TikTok reshaped global youth culture, music discovery, and even political discourse in about five years. The algorithm doesn't wait for infrastructure to catch up — it just needs a smartphone already in someone's pocket.

Scale: Over 5 billion people use social media. No single government policy, religious movement, or technology has ever had contemporaneous, real-time influence over that much of the human population simultaneously. And it's not passive reach like a billboard — it's an interactive feedback loop running continuously.

Depth: These algorithms don't just deliver content, they learn individual psychological triggers and optimize for engagement, which in practice means optimizing for outrage, tribalism, insecurity, and compulsive checking. This has measurably shifted attention spans, mental health trends (especially in teens), electoral outcomes, and even how language and humor evolve. Slang, fashion, political movements, and conspiracy theories now propagate on algorithmic time rather than generational time.

Efficiency: Unlike, say, forced industrialization or colonization, which required violence, capital, and years of infrastructure to transform societies, algorithms transform behavior with near-zero marginal cost per person and no physical coercion. That's a staggering efficiency ratio: minimal input (engineering + electricity), maximal output (global behavioral change).

Compare this to historical contenders — the printing press, the automobile, electricity, the atomic bomb, industrialization — each was transformative, but each also required enormous physical infrastructure, time, or force to scale. Algorithms scale through pure information distribution, using devices people already bought for other reasons.

CMV: is there a better candidate for "most efficient society-transforming tool" — and if so, what makes it more efficient than something that rewires attention and behavior for billions of people simultaneously, at near-zero cost, without firing a single shot?

In 1960, nearly one out of every five dollars earned went directly to keeping food on the table. Today, even after recent inflation spikes, that ratio sits at roughly one out of every nine dollars.

While lower-tier regional teams get weeks off to recharge, the world's best players are pushed to their absolute physical and mental limits without a breather. They used to have rest between MSI and fighting their regional splits, but now with EWC they are forced to play back-to-back tournaments to feed Riot and our entertainment. Before long we will see the quality of these games drop because the players are humans too, they will eventually crumble under this

You can't feel anything but boredom. You can always deactivate this and return to normal. Would you take this curse?

The aliens want to do research on human products so that they can apply the same design to their factories, so they contacted you. You have to give them any product they demand within 24 hours. A flying saucer will descend on a hill, only you can see it with the special glasses and you give them the stuff. If the product is particularly large, you can deal with them to extend the deadline. Would you take this deal?

Snow is falling from the sky, but only on your house and the 50-foot radius around it. In winter, snow falls twice as heavy on your house. Would you accept this curse?

• You can't choose which street, it's a random one in a random city on Earth

• You teleport there with the person, do it at 7 PM in public. At 8 PM you teleport back to where you were originally at

• Would you accept to do this?

How would you answer? Would you walk on it?

- You can choose what you transform to, as long as it's not human. Could be a cat, a dog, a fridge or whatever.

- You have to select your starting point after transforming. It could be your home or anyone you know's home. As long as you know their real name and face, you teleport there after transforming.

- After one hour you are teleported back to the original place and turn back to human.

- You can opt-out after 2 months of accepting this curse. Then you need to wait 2 months before joining again.

- Would you accept?