yes, the vast majority of web traffic is phones using apps. no person that uses this platform is an average user.

even if your family hates tiktok it’s still massively popular.

especially among the youth who probably only have a really shitty locked down chromebook from their school and the recently developing world. in the global south most people never got a decent computer. they all got phones instead. once you’re on a phone everything pushes you towards apps.

well that’s why most people use apps instead. the real internet is so hostile without a guide.

especially now that you can’t use the mainstream browsers and do it. the barrier to entry has gotten so high that i don’t blame kids for being put off by computers and prefering their phones for everything. tiktok has annoying ass ads, but no apps are as bad as the average news website…

it reminds me of trying to learn about cars growing up. i didn’t learn about cars growing up. i tried, but everyone i tried to learn from spent the whole time complaining about all the anticonsumer practices that made cars shitty these days. all the hoops you have to jump through to work on them yourself anymore. how the manufactures went out of their way over the course of years to take what used to be a fun tinkerers hobby for the everyman and made it incredibly difficult and expensive to do yourself.

my take away was “I hate cars”. so when i hear teenagers these days say that they hate computers i get it. they fucking suck now and there’s this 8 foot fence of knowing how to make them suck less before they can even start wanting to learn about them. but it’s going to take them a very very long time to get good enough with the computer that they can accomplish anything on it better than on their phone. so we have trucks full of ladders that can scale that fence, and even if we lose our ladders we know how to scale that fence barehanded if we gotta. but the kids just walk around the fence because they don’t value what’s inside. why would they?

so I’m just waiting for the old pc based intent to slowly wither away as we age with it… places like this becoming out last bastions in a world that requires validated apps on phones.

yeah, they really lost their early edge on the granny gamer market lol. they’ve all jumped ship to those bejeweled like games and virtual jugsaw puzzles. maybe wordle if they’re bookish.

i think there are little things you can play in some of their messaging platforms, but they change so much on those so often that these kinds of users probably ignore 90% of the interface. i think those hit more with the gen z and gen a younger crowds. especially when it can also become social media content. tiktok is great at that.

i guess, but it woulf require the least likely people to adopt a new and expensive technology. think about how long it took for the older generations to catch on to the internet and smart phones. they may be glued together now but it took 20 years and every single other person on earth getting one to make it happen.

warcraft for your lonely aunt is a fine idea. making that vr was poorly conceived. it would have to work on a phone AND be more compelling than just taking on call or text.

but also, the early adopter types that are more or less necessary to get something like this off three ground were never going to like it. that’s us. you can’t create a new tech market segment that wasn’t explicitly asked for without at least considering the nerds. meta has negative trust among nerds. we all saw this as the marketing and data collection tool that it is meant to be.

it was never going to happen. at least until they have full control of all of our devices and platforms and can just say we need it to continue existing in society now. that or b2b contracts are the only ways i could see this ever taking off. it would take some serious marketing voodoo bullshit to convince any sizable businesses that this would increase profits.

he probably went in as a true believer in the justice system and needed a lot of proof the break down the decades of propoganda that he grew up with. he might have thought prisons were for evil criminals that deserved to be there. he might have thought criminals are inherently dumb and that he could educate them on how easy and good it is to be good. a lot of cops and prison workers believe all this shit whole hearted and are too dumb to ever have another thought about it.

many of them just base their lives on a religious “authority is moral and just” style of beliefs and think it’s inherently morally wrong to question the rules. the authorities (their preachers and politicians) tell them these things, so to talk back against that would be sinful. even just thinking about how they might be wrong is sinful.

figuring out that the penal system that your core belief system always told you was right and good is actualy a tool of oppresion is simply too much for most of them. it’s not a simple matter of logic, it’s an assault on their very reality. to them the world is defined by the word of others. they don’t ever have to wonder if something is right or wrong, they have authority figures to do that for them. to tell them that said authority figure is wrong is to tell them that they can’t trust that up is up or down is down. it’s also how they feel no cognitive dissonance when doing things that their religion would say are wrong. the Bible and other Abrahamic texts are very clear that God’s plan is mysterious and unkowable. they’re also inherently vague and open to interpretation. Christian specifically are largely discouraged from deriving their own enterpretations from the texts. they don’t base their beliefs on the Bible, they base them on doing what they’re told. they do what God tells them, but most people can’t hear God so they do what the priest tells them. the priest tells them what politics and politicians are right because one side wants to pander to the church. so in their mind God talks through the priest to say that Donald trump and his ilk are just and good and godly. don’t worry about what they say or do, just trust that they will bring God’s will to America.

oppresing poor and brown people with the prison system is a primary goal of these politicians. their followers often believe that they are right with literal religious zeal. this guy probably had to have his entire world shattered before he could believe this.

that or he believed it the whole time and is just using the time he spent there to lend weight to his argument. or maybe something else entirely. idk, i made a lot of assumptions there.