alt Hacker News> nothing will change until people start holding their representatives accountable
Which itself won't change. The term for holding representatives accountable is "lobbying", which the public believes is an abhorrent act!
> and start voting for people that will actually do something about it.
The thing is, who wins an election matters little. There are always exceptions, and we've definitely seen exceptions, but most representatives are there in good faith. However, they are not mind readers. They can't do anything aligned to the people until the people start lobbying to make it known what they want — but the people won't do that because it is seen as abhorrent behavior.
> This wont happen anytime soon
Especially when appears likely that those companies are responsible for making the people believe that it is unacceptable to lobby. They have the marketing budgets and know-how to keep pushing that narrative until the end of time.
Replies
> The term for holding representatives accountable is "lobbying", which the public believes is an abhorrent act!
That’s a misrepresentation. You see plenty of exhortations to “call your representative”, which technically could be called lobbying, but that’s not what people find problematic. The issue is professional lobbying, which involves people paid to lobby, and often involves money or other incentives for the representative being lobbied. This kind of lobbying is not actually focused on holding representatives accountable, but rather on changing their positions.
As such, the above quote really doesn’t have much bearing on how much the public holds, or wants to hold, representatives accountable.
I could be wrong. Like when you're dumb enough to eliminate large swaths of the workforce, especially technologically skilled workers, you're risking these people using these same technologies to vote you out.
People know how to game the algorithms presented to them, so it's not as simple as having ad-bucks anymore.