This community usually discusses consumer rights, but nobody is discussing this initiative. Is it maybe cuz Lemmy’s majority ain’t American?
I’ve been out touching grass, what’s all this about?
No, I don’t wanna be associated with that guy.
I had never heard of him before. What’s his deal?
No, simply because I’ve never commented on youtube, so it’d be pretty useless, if not counterproductive. Giving even more information about my political/tech ethics to Alphabet doesn’t seem smart nor useful in my position. Also, I don’t even watch youtube videos on their website now. I usually use invidious instances or newpipe.
But I’m not against people doing it, especially if the ultimate goal is spreading awareness and building a community of people with privacy oriented ideas.
Have you changed you youtube pfp to clippy ?
I don’t work here.
no. I think Goatse would make more of an impact than Clippy. But something tells me there’d be a problem with that
PFP idea: a smashed server and a dude ripping it apart. I call it GOAITSE
I only watch the guy for one thing: His cats! :-)
In reference to the subject on Rossman’s screenshot, that is an 8 year old scandal that was, AFAIK, never proven. What was proven, was an 11 year old report on emotional manipulation by then Facebook
This was surfaced in Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book.
The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, “so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment,” according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook’s ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a “Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index.”
Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
Okay two things.
I didn’t set my pfp to clippy mainly because I’m lazy and don’t really comment on Youtube.
People complaining people are only doing this to follow a trend are completely right. BUT! some of those trend chasers might actually stop and think about the message, and might realized we’re all being scammed by modern tech/software companies.
I ain’t expecting some mass protest or anything, but it’s at the very least a small handful more people giving a shit about their relationship with technology. As apposed to most who just throw their information and money at any sign-up page that asks.
I keep seeing this posted, but what the hell is a pfp?
Pro-File Picture? I don’t know, people abbreviate things in stupid ways.
Pro file picture
Whatever happened to calling them avatars? First my PMs got turned into DMs, now this. I’m truly becoming old.
PM->DM was a mix of making it more obvious that those were NOT private in the slightest and to better align with marketing (“send a Direct Message to the celebrity you are stalking!”)
I am not sure when “pfp” took over but I’ve noticed over the past 3 or 4 months a LOT of random requests for a DM on discord of people asking where I got my pfp… which is literally a screenshot from a cartoon in the 00s. So I assume this is related to selling avatars to people on the game social networks?
Language simply changes over time.
I believe ‘avatar’ was generally changed to match Xbox and others using the term to describe full body digital expressions of the user, like the Xbox 360 avatars. I grew up knowing it as profile picture, but now I’ve changed my social messenger of choice to XMPP I’m seeing it referred to as an avatar again
Pff. This reminds me of the This Is Bob protest against the forced Google+ accounts that were the beginning of youtube enshittification. It didn’t do shit. Anyone who wants a profile on youtube nowadays has a Google account. Google+ may have failed but the intent and mission behind it didn’t. Google has total control over anyone who wants to use YouTube now.
You can set clippy as your profile pic and feel like you have done something, but it’s not gonna change anything.
If people want to actually do something, they should abandon these predatory services and go open source or maybe become anti tech as much as possible. It doesn’t matter whether or not you signal to the Zuckerburgers on top how you feel if you’re just gonna continue to use their products.
The only thing that would scare them would be the numbers plummeting if they saw a mass exodus from their platforms and services and people actively began looking for alternatives. But most people can’t be fucked to do that because they are too enmeshed with these services that it is easier to stay. But putting clippy as your profile pic is super easy and costs you nothing so yay. You get to feel like you did something without actually sacrificing anything to make change and the Zuckerburgers will look at you and shrug. “Ah, the peasants are blowing off some steam again”.
Sorry for being so negative, but this is honestly so fucking weak. I may have missed something, but when has slacktivism ever changed the minds of these companies?
I do really think that one of the things we have to do as collective, is something somewhat impossible but,
We need to pick the things we really care about. Limit ourselves from the everything that we have been offered for so long and find what brings us joy specifically and start following and protecting that and doing it off the Internet, or at least the at large big players.
Find artists in our spaces locally that make the comedy, or comics, or stories, the developers that make their own games and movies that dont outsource their work to others so that it no longer feels like art.We can still have globalised sharing and our spaces can support that by raising up the best of the best naturally through communication and sharing but not just by being told it’s gonna be big or given to us easily.
The only way out feels like we as a collective need to start putting work into cultivating and tending to our fandoms and we cant be as greedy as it will take more work. Im fine with us being an insatiable species craving for more cause its how we don’t stop, and i want new artists and new creators and new spaces. But i think we cant be lazy about it anymore. And i think doubly so we cant think we can do all of it.
Problem is that the majority of people are not going to do any of that because it takes work and people either don’t want to let go of comforts, they don’t care enough or they don’t have the energy to be digital activists after they have finished a day of work.
It will probably only gain traction if it becomes the cool thing to do among young people and even then, it will most likely be a smaller number of young people who will bother doing all of this.
The rest will become really good at prompting their way through life because its easier, more comfortable and takes the least effort.
they don’t have the energy to be digital activists after they have finished a day of work.
Good news! With the rate corporations are laying off and firing workers, pretty soon they will have plenty of time for activism.
/S
Yeah i mean that seems likely with how things are going but also things rarely go exactly to plan.
Im a realist so, i accept that it is entirely possible its gonna keep getting worse. I’m just also a sucker for optimism and maybe someday it will be better.
Probably not tomorrow or next year… Probably gonna be a lot more of this for a while.
Hold on to your optimism! We need people like you.
I consider myself a pessimistic optimist. Things probably aren’t gonna happen the way we hoped, but we will adapt and make some lemonade with what we are given.
It’s so rare that hyped movements go anywhere because the focus is always on the wrong things, but in the long term, if companies make it increasingly obnoxious to use their services, people will most likely silently make the move to open source through word of mouth. It isn’t as sexy and bombastic as making clippy your avatar and doing armchair V for Vendetta protests, but it’s through people’s silent choices that change will gradually happen. Whether or not this change will be felt on a grand scale, I don’t know. I also don’t really care. I just believe that over time, more and more people will eventually turn their back on the big tech companies while the rest will stick around either out of indifference or ignorance and that is their right too.
when has slacktivism ever changed the minds
Hey, don’t you remember how changing your Twitter profile picture to have a green overlay encouraged the Arab Spring to bring lasting democracy all over the Middle East?!? /s
Lol, did people do that? I only remember the black square for the blm movement, but I have also never really been on Twitter, so most of what I know about trends on that platform is what has been shared on other platforms.
Only one thing you can do to these bloated lizard-ass fuckers sipping boy-blood and soaking in little girl pussy on the most otherwise beautiful land in the world as the paranoiac securitization gradually creeps out from them building seemingly spontaneous bunker complexes everywhere they step will ever dissuade any of them from literally anything.
I do of course mean voting. You should vote for them.
Anyone remember blackout for gaza? It was performative then for a much more important cause with much more public support.
Clippy already was a big step in the wrong direction from Microsoft, i’m not gonna celebrate mistakes of the past because they seem benign in comparison to todays mistakes.
Clippy wasnt a bad idea, especially in an era where computers were just becoming mainstream. But just like most microsoft’s products, the poor implementation made it useless and annoying…
What about Tux throwing clippy in the bin? Acknowledgement and shows it doesn’t go far enough
how are there so many low iq comments about other mascot suggestions. rossman is doing something and he got traction. any people eternally caught in argument about details will never get the momentum to do anything. i used to not like clippy just like a lot of people, don’t get me wrong, but just focus on the important core idea, and the large exposure that is unique for the current moment and finally gives a glimmer of hope.
The issue is what this even accomplishes.
Traction is indeed important. But people also get exhausted (how many folk were whinging about “first I needed to make my avatar a rainbow and now it needs to be black? Oh, you mean a black box. Whoopsie” back in 2020?). It is why “just do something, it doesn’t matter what” is such a stupid fucking mentality because you waste the general good will towards pointless slacktivism and then people stop caring by the time you have an idea of how to utilize them.
Which… is where the Rossman comes in. I have a lot of issues with him as a human being but as an activist he is REALLY effective… for Right to Repair… for repair shops. But he has also made his career on convincing everyday people that he is fighting for them when he is really using them as ammunition for making sure his repair shop (that totally doesn’t violate any labor laws…) can stay running because OBVIOUSLY this lobbyist movement to support activity that requires a full hotplate and high powered microscope is something that everyday consumers care about (sort of in the sense of having options, but at this scale the poison pill apple compliance is actually probably just as good, if not better, for consumers)
I haven’t been able to even find a good explanation of what this is even supposed to accomplish. But, dime to a dollar, it is Rossman et al demonstrating how quickly he can mobilize The Internet as a negotiating tactic for whatever he and his lobbyist buddies are pushing on right now.
Im actually fine with “just do something” mentality.
Cause if every person did to the limit of what they are capable of things would still change.
For Rossman the limit of what he is capable of might be changing laws via his followers so he can keep his repair shop running. For others it might be legal efforts. For some it could be talking directly to their parents who are the wealthy overlords, and for some it might mean running themselves. And for some its just beinf oart of a chorus that shouts what they believe in.
It has worked for religion for so long.We are a numbers species. We arent as clever as we think and individuals actually rarely get anything singularly done themselves. But we cant stop at whats easy but what is within our reach.
If everyone “did what they can” to make the world a better place, we just might have a shot at it.We are a numbers species
And we only have power when we act in numbers towards a focused goal.
This is why we (should) have (more) Unions instead of just “Negotiate for yourself and everyone will benefit”. And that, inherently, needs leaders who know how to work towards a shared purpose.
Everyone should work towards making the world a better place. But we also need to understand what we are actually working towards and what those “somethings” actually can accomplish.
Yeah. Agreed but chicken or the egg right?
Uts easy to say we just need the unions and groups but we need to build them by people just starting.
We definitely need to pick people to leas us better and not pazily accept people saying they are the right personto lead simply because they are.
It helps when we have a shared idea of what better is.
This comment section does not understand what Rossmann’s trying to do. Obviously google, facebook etc. are not going to fall to the ground with tears in their eyes with this. It’s more about building and organizing the community, to make them feel their not alone and something can and should be taken back. This is analogous to how 4chan making Trump their meme candidate helped him out a fair bit.
The real question is of course whether or not anyone is gonna do something past changing their profile pictures.
I give this trend a couple of months. Maximum a year and then a bunch of people will have clippy avatars and everything will go back to normal.
Something like Stop Killing Games was an initiative that only survived because one man dedicated a good portion of his life to get the issue brought before the eyes of actual politicians. Even before the pirate software drama, Ross had been talking about this issue for years and many people agreed, but nobody did anything except for Ross. Maybe the petition would have reached its goal without piratesoftware’s initial meddling. Maybe it wouldn’t. His subsequent sperging turned failure into success, but the issue is still in process to be reviewed and maybe it will be a win, maybe the lobbyists will shut it down. We don’t know yet. But without Ross’ stubbornness, nothing would be done.
Imagine if Ross had told gamers to change their profile pic to pacman to show game companies and consumers that "we dont agree with the companies’ practices? That would be a total joke.
I can count the amount of fucks any tech giant gives about Clippy avatars on a snake’s hands.
It’s a good thing that’s not what it’s about then. It’s about showing the size of the community, and knowing that there are other people like you that care, and thus you will be more likely to actually do something.
Had me in the first half, but I don’t see any clippys doing much of anything but ishposting
On the other hand, seeing this symbol more and more on other random videos outside that bubble does give a very nice sense of “I am not alone”. It does more for users to find eachother than it does damage to big corpos.
But choice of the symbol itself is questionable… Why use a big tech symbol to protest big tech? -__- And not just any big tech, but super evil 90s monopolistic giant Microsoft
There’s a nice cartoon in this thread we’re clippy is if he could have, he would have harvest all your data.
we know we are not alone because here we are.
i don’t need a boost to my ego or hopium, i need solutions.
Come on. Changing an avatar picture has never achieved anything. On top of that, changing to a corporate mascot to fight corporate greed….give me a break. There are better actions to take like being on fediverse instead of Reddit or other social media platforms or using libre office. I get the rant but an avatar change doesn’t mean anything.
It’s mostly idiots who want to be part of something and some that “don’t like” what is happening but put in the least possible amount of effort pathetically to attempt to cause a change, and this only when someone popular suggests.
They never really want to stop using the product. It’s like drug addicts trying to make drugs less addicting by “protesting” against the very thing they use (and will keep using) literally everyday.
Personally, I have more of a “I’m not alone” feeling when I actively leave services that I disagree with and through word of mouth find alternatives where I can talk to people who seem to have the same base values I do. Even if we disagree on other things.
It’s the laziness of this initiative that drives me up a wall. People want change but they don’t want to work for or sacrifice anything for it.
I agree with you
Thank you. I needed that chuckle 😂❤️
