This is peak enshittification- ads for most people are annoying at best, absolutely jarring at worst, especially for people who are neurodivergent and just want to listen to an ambient soundscape or the same song on loop for 20 minutes. Hopefully adblocking tech keeps up, as otherwise, it's just unusable. (Or other video sharing platforms will start cropping up. Or, you know, we all go back to bittorrent for our media.)

I mean at the end of the day, 'nothing personal' still feels bloody personal when it's a fundamentally exclusionary practice, and in alignment with this administration's massively anti-autism bent. When RFK goes out and says that autistic people will never have jobs, it emboldens businesses to stop accommodating autistic employees' needs. IT is one of the few lucrative careers neurodivergent people actually tend to do really well at, and blocking them out of it is just a step in the wrong direction. When I worked in IT, I made six figures. Now that I'm out, only place I could find that'd actually accommodate me was a nonprofit, and the wages there are a pittance. My mental health's great, but I'm poor.

I'm an autistic adult who's done both the office thing and the wfh thing, and honestly, the best is WFH for a lot of reasons. First off, there's no stupid, pointless conversations that just serve to completely derail me. (I remember there was a secretary who would pop by my desk several times a day just to make chit chat, drove my insane as I'd be neck deep in complex work and it takes a long time for me to retrace my thoughts) While Zoom meetings can be exhausting, I'd take them any day over in person meetings where I feel there's this constant need to make eye contact and be 'normal' even as my skin feels like it's crawling. I have a lot more control over my sensory environment at home, so I can actually focus. I don't have to go play peacemaker between neurotypical employees who are playing BS politics, or deal with petty drama. Working from home, I go at my own pace, which usually looks like 2-3 hours of really concentrated, hyperfocused work, then a few hours of relaxing, then back to 2-3 hours of hyperfocus- often getting the same amount of work done that my non-autistic employees would do in the office (or hell, sometimes outpacing them and getting all my tasks done by Tuesday.) I think there's going to be a big push to show that autism is a deficit, and that autistic people fail in work, and removing the ability to WFH is a guaranteed way to show that's true. We can get the work done great, but working in the office drives us insane.

Just because there isn't a culture of punch down humor like on X, doesn't mean there's no comedy. Although I will say the feel is that of a digital refugee camp- A lot of people there are folks who are pissed off at what's happening to the country, so there's less humorous content, and more news discussion. Will say the engagement on Bluesky feels a lot more like old Twitter- fewer bots, lot faster follower count (I'm about to hit 7k), and more people actually wanting to talk instead of just spewing content or self promotion.

I've been in the FOSS and DIY scene on and off for 20 years, and there's always been some core group of DIY people doing cool stuff, whether it's custom ROMs, FOSS stuff, or just hosting their own servers and mesh nets. I know a few people dabbling with building their own AIs- A buddy of mine built a LMM to handle citywide policy analysis (he works as a civil servant). Kinda surreal to see this AI that literally sits in his basement. But I think the democratization of AI will happen when more people start getting into it and realizing, screw it, I can make my own. It's happening, but slowly.

No AI. It brings absolutely nothing of value, and likely will never. It serves to consume while only removing the ability to have any type of digital or information literacy. One of the most rewarding things about the internet was that it rewarded curiosity, problem solving, and research skills. AI removes all of these things by giving you bad information (while sucking up your personal data.) Ads are also bad, as they are not sensory friendly- they exist to make your internet experience a jumbled, dangerous cluster-f of garbage. If you've got people with sensory issues, they're gonna be overwhelmed. I use adblock because using a normal browser, it gives me a headache- More and more ads are coming for our personal environments, whether that be our desktop PCs, our TVs, or even our dashboards, and it's dangerous and awful. I have a practice of, if I see an ad, NEVER purchasing that brand. Ever.

In high school, there were a handful of computers in the library connected to the internet, and I was one of the few that actually took the time to take the training to be allowed on the internet, which landed me a little sticker on my ID that said 'INTERNET.' I remember it making my life so much easier right off the bat as far as writing papers and stuff went, amazed other people weren't using it. But, it was a nerdy thing back then. I vaguely miss those days, when the internet wasn't this oppressive force.

Disability advocate who focuses most of my work on studying neurodivergence and quality of life here. Few things.

There was a study some time ago that found that autistics have a similar shortened lifespan of roughly 5-7 years off, although the good news is that's lower than it was 10 years ago, where it was something like 19 years shorter. There were some interesting biological pieces, including that autistics tend to develop more neurological conditions as they age, so that contributed to mortality.

However, it's important to look at quality of life when you're looking at aging. A lot of people with ADHD have a harder time holding down steady work, finding partners that support them, steady housing, and often times are dealing with a much higher level of residual stress and often maldaptive coping mechanisms. (Same is seen with autistics.) These things add up. That's why, within the autism community at least, there's a lot of interest in autistic elders, and figuring out how they have good aging. A lot of it comes down to a supportive job and home environment.

This will result in an internet that is optimized to bring even more ads, to the point where search has *nothing* to do with any reality, and is just nothing but an AI pushing junk. Thanks Microsoft, Google, AI.

So I was brought over to a fortune 500 after an acquisition, where the fortune 500 promptly killed the product through poor integration into their system. But, they kept me on to EoL it, then put me on a team where I was in essence a backup engineer, doing pretty much an hour a day of work, maybe. (Not including the pointless meetings.) Honestly, the biggest fault was on management not actually talking to me and figuring out what I could bring to the table, so instead I just sort of became a background fixture and picked up a fat paycheck for a while. Eventually they RIF'd me and I went into mental health crisis/intensive care, which was where I actually wanted to be, and was suddenly quite busy.

I've been in the D&D social skills scene for over a decade, and it goes beyond what's listed in the paper. Since I've had kids that stay in my group for up to 5 years (starting as 8th graders and graduating out as seniors) I've been able to see them not only develop general social skills, but much higher advocacy level skills for supporting autistics.

What I really like doing is teaching the social skills stuff through the game, but teaching them how to self/peer advocate at the table. So, I get them to role play and practice conversation skills as their dwarven arcanist or kobold influencer or whatever, but at the table they're learning how to support an autistic who is getting overwhelmed, or needs some space, etc. Just fantastic stuff. I'm getting a paper published next month on it.

I'm a disability advocate with 15 years of working with neurodivergent youth, often times with problem screen behavior. I've done a lot of talks on screentime and youth, focusing on neurodivergent community and problem behavior. Few things wrong with this:

Talks about internet addiction without nuance. When you're talking about addiction, you need to look at the context around it. A lot of parents like to say that their kids are addicted to screens, but when you actually look at their home life, the parents are on their phones all the time as well. Kids soak that up like a sponge. Furthermore, if someone is developing a problem behavior, there's usually a root cause. If you have someone who hasn't gotten out of bed for days due to a depressive episode, you don't say 'oh that person has bed addiction.' Youth mental health is really, really bad right now, and blaming phones is blaming a (not great) coping mechanism, but ignoring the root causes just harms kids more.

A lot of 'internet addiction treatment' is absolute bunk. Taking a coping mechanism from a kid only teaches them that adults will take away things that feel good and drop them off at a fun summer camp when they become a problem, which can be a very, very bad thing when the kids turn 21 and discover that alcohol is a lot of fun, and easy to hide the use of.

I think there's a larger conversation about phones and mental health here, but people keep on asking 'are phones the problem?' and not 'how much are phones the problem?' Problematic phone behavior doesn't happen in the void, and very often the kids with so called 'internet addiction' also have ADHD, anxiety, depression, autism, or any number of other things that can make a brain scan look off. There's also a very prevalent despair with the younger generation about the state of the world. So, going after a coping mechanism just turns parents into the bad guys, rather than trying to understand what's up.

I am an autism self advocate, and a big thing for many of us with sensory issues is that we need a LOT of ability to control our sensory environments, especially when we're at home and trying to recharge. Adblock is *very* useful for this, as ads tend to be incredibly disregulating. Youtube needs to make ads accessible if they want them to be unskippable, otherwise they are telling people with sensory differences to effectively F off. Accessibility in ads means this: No garish colors. Text only. No sound. Skippable. Do not interrupt a video that's already going.

I work with people, and when I get home my social battery is completely drained. I frequently listen to ambient music playlists to just calm down and not have a meltdown. Whenever adblock isn't working, I occasionally have such big, visceral reactions that I've almost punched my monitor. It triggers a neurological fight or flight crisis situation, and I've seen similar situations with other autistics and Youtube's ads.

But Youtube does not give a shit about people with sensory differences. Or, they expect us to pay yet another disability tax.

Not only is adblock a sensory need for autistic people who have sensory needs (I've seen autistic kids trying to watch videos that help them calm down and not go into crisis, and then the ads start and they have a full melt down.), there's a safety component. The ads are absolutely predatory, toxic, NSFW, and obnoxious. I worry about seniors clicking on these garbage sites and getting scammed.

Maybe instead of blocking ads, they need to demand better ads. Allow accessibility options for people with sensory differences. Get rid of the toxic ads.

But, Google does not give a damn about people with disabilities. It's damn embarrassing. Don't be evil for a long time, it's just, Be Evil.

Ads are a living hell for people with sensory issues going on. They're often way too loud, absolutely jarring, and unskippable. Really hard when you're watching the show you use to get regulated after a bad day, and suddenly it's disrupted by something unexpected, loud, and unavoidable. It was bad enough that Youtube did this shit, but I was worried others would follow suit, demanding people with sensory disabilities pay more just to use their products safely.