Some day, we’ll have a technology sub that isn’t polluted with Twitter “news”.
It’s a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.
Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch platforms combust due to their own arrogance.
We’ll save you a seat, but you’ll need to bring your own popcorn.
Anyway I’m glad this shitshow happened because it was a much needed boost for federated software like Lemmy.
These were weeks where decades happened.
Remember the old memes? Those were the days…
In AD2001, memes were beginning.
*laughs in Cats*
Turns out X is giving it to itself. Ironic.
Fuck waitin’ for you to get it on your own
X gon’ deliver to ya
And remind ourselves that it find very easily happen to the fediverse! All it takes is mass defederation, some vulnerability, anything ego driven… humans still run this platform and it wouldn’t take much to bring it down.
the Fediverse is growing, but still small. If anything (as much as I’m personally enjoying it) at this stage of growth, it would be still statistically likely to fade to irrelevance in a few years, so it would not even be big news. Seeing a couple of the Big Socials being dismantled this way at the same time is… something else. I’m getting tired too of all this coverage about Twitter and Reddit and start wishing Lemmy had filtering by keyword, but rationally I know it’s granted.
I believe some of the apps do have keyword filtering, but idk which ones.
Might be worth looking into if it’s something you want to avoid.
thanks, I was starting to look into some of the apps, but so far I haven’t found one that works better for me (on Android) than the mobile web version. I have never looked specifically into keyword filtering though.
I definitely can’t log on without hearing about how any even remotely popular instance is actively working to create an echo chamber for the right by defederating anything that might even consider allowing a community to the left of centrist dems.
I think, given what I’ve seen so far, is that there’s going to basically be faschie status quo lemmy and then everyone else lemmy.
Because capitalism is so great and superior if you let it’s adherents so much as think there’s literally any other option it all crumbles to dust immediately 😂
Elon calls them Rapid Unplanned Disassemblies.
Never understood why we call them tech companies to be honest. There is nothing technologically interesting at twitter. And if there is… it is never the subject.
So I think the main thing is scale—they’re tech companies (in the category they’re in) because of the engineering required to build & maintain something that operates at the scale they do
And IMO at least in the early years it was pretty impressive what Twitter was capable of in terms of technology.
If I remember, tech companies are generally those whose primary products are digitally based. And technology these days has essentially become synonymous woth the internet.
Let’s hope “X” continues down the path to it’s own demise.
I’m still waiting for any article that talks about the tech that Twitter is supposed to be so famous for.
What Twitter did well I think was handle the non-trvial problems of scale, and did a fairly credible job of content moderation. I can find fault with a lot of how they handled that but they did honestly try. Becoming the dominant platform is always largely luck, but had they not adequately handled scale and content they would not have lasted for so long. Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Twitter like it or not has been pivotal for connecting people around the world especially those with less developed infrastructure. The Arab Spring events would not have happened without it. Which is why I think the Saudis were happy to give Elon money. They knew he’d either make it more friendly for them, or kill it and they’d have a hold on him because of the money he owes.
Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Their content filtering/categorisation was also quite good. They’re one of the few sites I can think of that had a bit more clarification than a basic “NSFW/Sensitive Content” tag, even if it came rather late, so if something was marked correctly, you could get an idea of what kind of NSFW content it was, without unblurring the image.
They made the popular CSS framework Bootstrap, which led to thousands of new websites for a while looking the same. 😅😬
This is a bit of a learning experience though.
The big tech companies advocated during 2020 that they were not biased and should not be held responsible for policing the Internet.
Since then, FB swapped to Meta to cover up the documents showing FB is intentionally causing psychological damage our children because it gives them more clicks/view time.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
Twitter, a social media company known for free speech, was bought by Musk, a former Trump associate. Trump was reinstated during this period and dissent was banned.
Google decided to push web DRM to force us to use their software or else we can’t access the Internet.
Sounds like they very much want to police the Internet. We just aren’t putting the pieces together in a collective way.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
I’m not a huge OpenAI fan, but it’s not yet been determined that they acted illegally. I believe the matter is still being pursued in court.
I think people are too focused on the scraping, which is clearly not illegal, but is what the roch people who own the websites are hollering about because they wanted to make money off of selling the posted content they did not actually own
Open AI’s implementation of image creation in the style of a particular artist using copyrighted works is going to be the big outcome.
It’s not illegal for a person to learn things online. That’s one of the original purposes of the “world wide web” when it was opened to universities.
It is illegal to copy someone’s brand and use it to make money. These chat bots are literally charging people to take input like “write a story in this author’s style” and outputting a story that is a poor mimicry. The main problem is they are charging money based on someone else’s trademark. Not that they write a similar story.
This feels like Andy Warhol’s art combined with TPB’s court processing.
Andy earned money buy making art using other’s art and TPB sold ads while telling you where you could aquire content illegaly, while never actually hosting any of the content.
Where does the line go? If I write a book the is similar to someone else’s book, is that illegal? If I use a tool to help me write? Which tools are allowed and which are not?
It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
Immorally then.
Illegally, maybe. Immorally, probably not. It’s fine for a human to read something and learn from it, so why not an algorithm? All of the original content is diluted into statistics so much that the source material does not exist in the model. They didn’t hack any databases, they merely use information that’s already available for anyone to read on the internet.
Honestly, the real problem is not that OpenAI learned from publicly available material, but that something trained on public material is privately owned.
but that something trained on public material is privately owned.
Is that really a problem? Is a create something new based on public knowledge, should I not be able to profit from it?
I learn to paint from YouTube, should I paint for free now?
I’ll admit that the scope of ChatGPT is MUCH bigger than one person painting.
I’d say that was a more controversial opinion. From a purist perspective I tend to believe that intellectual property in general is not ethical and stifles innovation.
On Reddit I’ve found most of the news about the big social networks is posted by only handful accounts, they also don’t post other interesting things, so you can just block them.
I’m hoping that’ll work on Lemmy as well.
I haven’t seen an option to block people here on Lemmy. I’m a new migrant (12+ years on reddit, nuked to oblivion), so maybe I just haven’t seen the option yet. But i did look for a quick second before posting this reply, to no avail.
Click on their name, on the upper right of the page you end up on will be two buttons, “Send Message” and “Block User”. Hit the latter.
And welcome aboard! (I’m a fairly new Lemmy immigrant as well)
blocking is there , go to user profile
an example of spammers is this https://lemm.ee/post/2676046 , that user made 593 posts in 80 days , 7.4 each day
People tend to call everything fediverse “Lemmy” which causes some confusion.
Kbin has the options to block people, magazines/communities, and entire instances. Hopefully Lemmy will get the block feature because it is awesome for the few times it is needed.
I’m not confused. You can block people on Lemmy.
Can you also block communities/magazines and instances on Lemmy now?
I probably grouped the three together when it was one or two of those levels.
Yes, you can block communities. Instances are a little more complicated since that’s defederation and happens at the instance level, but since you won’t see posts from communities you aren’t subbed to that’s less of an issue.
I have seen posts from instances with communities I’m not subbed to on the kbin “All” list because someone else on the same kbin server subbed to it. It makes discovering new communities very easy since I don’t need to do all the leg work on my own.
You can block communities and users on Lemmy. You can’t block instances, but that wouldn’t make sense since you don’t see their content unless you go there or subscribe to a community. Maybe blanket blocking users from an instance would be useful.
Not sure if Lemmy is the same, but my understanding of the fediverse structure was that if someone subbed to a magazine/community on another instance then it would show up in All for everyone logged into the same instance. On kbin I have never needed to sub to anything on lemmy.world or beehaw or whatever because someone else subbed to it first and it just shows up on my All feed.
A mild example of blocking an instance would be if there was one that was entirely in a language I don’t know then I have the option to block the instance instead of playing whack a mole with each magazine/community to hide the content that I can’t read.
On connect for lemmy we have the option to block instances.
Lemmy has apps.
there’s a tampermoney script to block whole instances
That’s just true of social media in general. 1% of the accounts generate 99% of the content.
Always remember to never feed the trolls. It’s a very basic Internet rule that we should have continued to follow. Block and move on
i think in this case we also want to consider…
do not click a twitter link
… as the article states, it is the traffic, itself, that they want.
Even better. Don’t click on Twitter and don’t engage with trolls in any format.
Don’t they want to reduce traffic since they can’t pay their bills?
Sounds like a surefire way to get Donald Trump elected again.
Ignoring the trolls caused 2016 to happen. At that point, it became clear that the trolls have gathered in power, have organized politically and have explicitly made their methodology into the leading political force for the Republican party.
Ehhh… more like the opposite. The mainstream media engaged the trolls on a mass scale and the golden turd won.
Exactly. Don’t feed the trolls
All the ignoring you or I did does nothing.
Why do you think the media will ignore Donald Trump in the next election? We all know what’s happened and where things will go for round 2. But if you stick your head in the sand and yell “don’t feed the trolls” whenever that orange buffoon is mouthing off, you’ll only cause them to grow in power.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t inspire civil rights by ignoring his opponent’s arguments. Ignoring others is probably the worst possible move you could do on a political level, because they’ll just catch the attention of the media and monopolize upon the attention.
That concept isn’t what got Trump elected.
Cambridge Analytica got him elected. The superior data they had got him elected. He went out and promised the rust belt, among others) exactly what they wanted, and they took a chance on him after decades of being lied to by the Democratic party. Then combine that with the blatant gerrymandering, and you have a win for the greedy morons.
While that was happening the Democratic party was on a fools errand to try and flip Texas blue.
Good theories. But it doesn’t match the present reality. Why is Donald Trump still the frontrunner today for the Republican Party?
Koch backs others. DeSantis has plenty of backers. Etc. etc. Its certainly not money or data anymore.
Donald Trump IS a troll. He’s a master troll. You can’t ignore him because he sucks in the world and with his discussion style convinces plenty of people to follow him. “Ignore the troll” is the stupidest piece of advice you can give for someone like Donald Trump. He doesn’t give a shit about you, his allies or anyone else. And people LIKE him because of that, because people like asshole leaders in practice.
Then combine that with the blatant gerrymandering
While the electoral college does give less populous states and outside influence, but you can’t gerrymander presidential elections without changing the borders of states.
There are probably ways to counter misinformation without giving the bad actors involved any additional platform.
They already have a platform. Its called Twitter.
They’ll have that platform whether or not you post a reply.
But posting a direct reply will give them additional attention, from your own followers and from algorithmic boosting.
If simply replying to bad actors with facts and demanding decency helped in any way, they wouldn’t have gotten as relevant as they are.
That’s all good theory or whatever, but you ain’t gonna stop Donald Trump (or DeSantis) from getting boosted to the top. Certainly not when Elon is in charge of Twitter.
Of course, because these already have a whole established follower base. But it can prevent upcoming reactionary outrage mongers from gaining momentum.
Keep in mind that I didn’t say to ignore them entirely, I said that replying directly is a bad approach. Because the people who already follow them likely won’t listen to reason, and it might only highlight it to potential targets to be radicalized. But bad rhetoric can be countered and refuted without direct attribution. You could instead reply to a screenshot with the handle cut out or just speak on the topic without bringing up who is stirring shit this time around.
I thought it was the same thing that happens with these “content creator” in every niche. Over saturation requiring these greater extremes to get more attention.
Salon.com articles always sound like a 21 year old Redditor wrote them.
“The grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex are not okay.”
Who writes this lmao. Do they spin a wheel of buzzwords and just write a sentence with whatever comes up?
Amanda Marcotte is the author, a reasonably distinguished and well known figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte
Guess she just knows her audience is buzzword-craving 21 year old Redditors then.
If you write for salon.com, you are not distinguished. It’s a basically a left wing tabloid and should not be misconstrued as a news website.
Could you elaborate exactly what you find problematic about that wording?`Those terms seems to be a pretty accurate description of the phenomenon.
It’s cringe and embarrassing to me. That’s all I’m saying.
I kind of like the “troll-industrial complex”, but agree on your over take on the writing. Gone are the days when writers could produce great alliterations like “nattering nabobs of negativity”.
The escalation may have nothing to do with the slow demise of Twitter. It may be the case that the liberals have gotten used to one level of trolling and ignore it. Trollers then have to become even more extreme to get their attention.
Twitter also recently started paying users who get more engagement like quote retweets, thus, people do would normally bash trolls via QRT are less likely to keep doing it
The escalation may have nothing to do with the slow demise of Twitter. It may be the case that the liberals have gotten used to one level of trolling and ignore it. Trollers then have to become even more extreme to get their attention.
