Billions of people are on social media platforms run by massive companies who spend enormous sums of money researching how to get and keep people addicted to their platforms. Vast teams of highly paid experts spend their days figuring out how to keep people coming back, and their happiness or well being are not a concern. Conflict and rage get engagement, so they push conflict and rage.
It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.
Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.
It's probably old age, but I can't understand how people enjoy Discord or find it useful. To me it's like another Slack to try to stay on top of, except no one is paying me to stay on top of Discord. Discussion forums were truly the peak of the internet to me
When I opened Discord recently a popup appeared explaining how to earn “Orbs” and trade them for rewards. I’d say that’s pretty consistent with “capitalist hellscape”.
I wouldn't say they're at the hellscape stage yet. They need money, but they still haven't locked in enough customers to start outright abusing them. So they use middle of the road approaches like their quests, stores and cosmetics to get some extra cash while also having these things be completely optional and beside the actual messaging experience. Only after they get big enough will the hellscape stage start - perhaps, banner ads, automatically joining sponsored servers for users, clawing back essential features to put them behind Nitro, stuff like that.
I know this is kinda a grampa thing to say, but can you imagine timemachining a farmer from 100 years ago to today's "capitalist hellscape" and ordering him a burger on Uber Eats...
I think a rural farmer from 1925 can understand "I pay an immigrant to deliver me hot food via an exploitative middleman", if he's Indian maybe his cousin that went to the city is a dabbawalla.
Like you can do your hypothetical right now with a plane ticket and a 4x4 trip to the Colombian Andes. The peasant might call you a softie, but he's not gonna become Steve Pinker and tell you everything is A-OK.
The 01925 dime is worth about US$3 as bullion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907742) even without getting into collectors' value, so a couple of dimes or a quarter will pay for a hamburger. You may just have to stop by a jeweler or a pawn shop first.