This is most definitely a feature here. What ARS won’t say (but their source articles do) is that Newsbreak is an app right out of China. That’s why they don’t care that this creates entirely fictional stories. This is the leftwing equivalent of all those rightwing agitprop sites that pretend to be local news in order to trick people

It’s easy for people to cherrypick with groups.

There are tons of antisemitic leftists. I’ve had to heavily curate my social media because of them, and I’m lucky because that’s all I’ve had to do (eg, I’m not being chased across college campuses or doxxed for belonging to a synagogue or have people waiting outside of my door to hound me immediately).

But there are tons of leftists who aren’t as well.

Leftism has become co-opted as way for people to virtue signal and rationalize things they want to believe. The right is definitely seizing on this strife. But historically, there’s nobody the left likes to fight more than other leftists.

And the meme at the top about immigrants… that isn’t new. The USSR was famous for establishing ethnostates and it carries over to modern day. Sure, you could immigrate. But it isn’t like workers held hands and ignored the differences. The pressure was there, but perhaps not the wage pressure. Out groups were still blamed for things like shortages and service degradation, just like today. Nor a defense of anti immigration, but people seem to think the problem exists in uneducated or unenlightened people close to be leftwing. Nope, it’s our cohort. We are watching it in real time right now.

The problem in this scenario is that the biggest player will still have an opportunity to dominate. Proof of work blockchain? Well, Amazon just has to outspend all the others—which they can handily do, or run computation on AWS. Similar with staking, except worse because more money = more direct influence.

Our local stores, as discussed in other comments, can’t even offer shipping or workable websites. And we expect them to self administer part of that blockchain? They are just going to pay Amazon to do it.

And big data companies like Amazon would love to peer into the blockchain and see the throughput for each of these competitors and discover patterns. Edit: and they already do that for vendors selling on Amazon, which is where all these Amazon-branded products come from.

That’s probably the biggest turn off to the MBA-types; it would require sharing information, even if obfuscated.

Mastodon often feels to me more like Facebook for software developers

I wish. I’ve tried to curate mine as such.

My mastodon feed is awash in spam from authors hucking their LLM generated stories. Constantly. And random low viewer count streamers spamming hashtags every hour 24/7.

It’s crazy how much LinkedIn-like sociopathy is out there right now. Makes sense given the huge spike in new accounts we’ve had in the last month.

And let’s not forget the societal implications of celebrating and institutionalizing abject greed-is-good mentality. Capitalism inherently trends toward zero sum thinking and acting. Little wonder it always leads to something resembling fascism in the end. Some countries just haven’t advanced that far yet, but that’s why it is a very real threat even in what my fellow Americans idealize in democratic “socialism,” a “socialism” in which parasitic capitalists still get to retain ownership of enterprise while they grow fat and rich off the work of others. This is why there has been a resurgence of ultra rightwing extremists around the world in capitalist systems.