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Protect me from what I want

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Re: Protect me from what I want

#101

Post by sien »

bitwize wrote: post #15
nostromo wrote: post #8

Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…

Read Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" to see why this is the case: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr... The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speec…

And read Marcuse for gems like this :

"They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."

That is, if you oppose the expansion of government you should have your right to free speech removed.

From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse

Which shows the problem with idea of 'we must remove free speech for hate speech' because one of the originators of the idea intended that free speech should be withdrawn from people he disagreed with in ways that many or even most people in most Democratic states would find abhorrent.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#102

Post by Pxtl »

senko wrote: post #3
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #2

The shock people experience when you tell them any sorting, especially sorting chronologically, requires an "algorithm" is disappointing.

It makes perfect sense considering the wider public understands "algorithm" as "big,opaque,unknowable way of doing something probably tilted towards interests of the corporation/government", which is how the word has been used in mass media for years.

Kind of like the word "agenda", which basically just means a "to-do list". But an "agenda" often represents the accusation that you've got a secret nefarious goal.

Or even "rhetoric" which is just the term for the art of speaking well, but now has been taken to imply flashy and dishonest tricks of speech.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#103

Post by fleddr »

tensor wrote: post #81
eatonphil wrote: post #39

Even if Mastodon doesn't want to implement or play with "algorithms" (ignoring as is correctly pointed out that everything is/has an algorithm), all Mastodon content is ActivityPub content, right? So someone can put together a Mastodon alternative that supports pluggable algorithms, no? No need to convince the Mastodon devs who don't want this sort of thing.

Unfortunately every time I hear this sort of thing be suggested there is a rallying cry from the original mastodon crowd to block said thing. It's really unfortunate and why I don't see mastdodon as a truly viable alternative to twitter. Perhaps if a fork of it gains enough influence that isn't hostile to algorithms and indexing it would work better.

Instance blocking will ultimately create the exact same dynamic as found at Twitter.

Aggressive online activism, regardless of your political direction, is here to stay. So it can and will be used to pressure other instances into blocking yet other instances.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#105

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #91
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"paradox of tolerance" is a hypocrisy. If you are intolerant only to the intolerant you are not tolerant, it is as simple as that.

You do realize that both "paradox" and "hypocrisy" have the same basic definition, don't you? They both mean "self-contradictory", the biggest difference is in connotation, not meaning.

No. These words do not have the same basic definition.

Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. [0]

Paradox: A statement that seems to contradict itself but may nonetheless be true. [1]

Every time I see someone here mentioning someone the paradox of tolerance, it is to support restriction of speech for someone else. (someone really bad, of course - fascist, antivaxer, racist, you name it), and these people always hypocritically consider that they support free speech, just not for those bad people.

[0]: https://www.wordnik.com/words/hypocrisy

[1]: https://www.wordnik.com/words/paradox

Re: Protect me from what I want

#106

Post by kannanvijayan »

pessimizer wrote: post #87
viraptor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's some nuance here though, where people do make a distinction between opposing views and harmful content. (likely not everyone, but still) What I mean is, I don't care if someone reads a politician I hate. I care if they read a politician who enables the next pizzagate or worse. Or if they read state sponsored misinformation while thinking it's genuine opinions. And yeah, I do acknowledge there's some o…

The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read.

> The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read.

As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums.

The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what constitutes communication which can be considered abusive. As it will for any other person.

Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.

I guarantee you if we have a back and forth discussion we will discover where your boundaries lie across the myriad issues where people typically want to control public discourse.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#107

Post by fleddr »

mhink wrote: post #94
fleddr wrote: post #93

If one was to be a purist, you'd remove the boost option. With a boost you want to increase the visibility of a post by somebody else. Probably because you agree with it. Something has to happen with that boost signal, otherwise boosting is pointless. Hence, in some way a boosted or often boosted post is promoted over ones that are not boosted. As the boosted post gets more eye balls, it will get even more boosts. No…

> The other downside of boosts, retweets, quote tweets is that it discourages writing your own original posts. More than 80% of what Twitter calls tweet activity is simply retweets, not new tweets. I don't really see a way around this unless you explicitly try to prevent people from posting things that have been posted before. IIRC, retweets were originally just normal tweets that people tacked the letters "RT" in fr…

I'm under no illusion that such feature will ever be removed, but I stand by the concept/idea that social media should be about people sharing their own thoughts and ideas, rather than this lazy and mindlessly redistribution.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#108

Post by shadowgovt »

fleddr wrote: post #96
wallfacer120 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.

Quoted post unavailable.

It's not irony. The ability to say something doesn't imply anyone is obligated to either listen or agree.

Downvotes imply a desire to quiet a signal (or at least, a belief the signal is uninteresting and should show up below other signals) and the site is designed to enhance interesting signals and suppress uninteresting ones.

Everything here is doing exactly what it says on the tin. The weird notion is that one should be able to just walk into a space like this, say whatever, and get it treated with the same reverence as any other statement.

There are other places on the internet that act like that, and they are not this place.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#109

Post by ilyt »

nostromo wrote: post #8

Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…

Eh, I think many of them are fully aware that it is the platform that pushes views that agree with them, hence any notion of removing "moderation" seems like helping "the enemy" get a hold.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#110

Post by ilyt »

stickfigure wrote: post #48
ska wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality. "quality" here meaning accurac…

Oh come now. I constantly hear this concern from my friends (almost exclusively left-of-center). And they aren't totally wrong? I have a qanon-er in my family; she's carefully curated her media sources to guarantee a pure, steady stream of nutjob garbage. The thing is, censoring twitter/facebook/youtube makes no difference - these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look. At least on youtube…

> Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.

I'd imagine most people have reasonable assumption than YT will only show you more stuff that you like (as in press the like button), not that any engagement, even downvotes, will continue to put more shit into your stream.

Ever wondered why YTbers ask for comments and don't shy from saying "if you didn't like it, downvote and tell me in the comments"? That still drives engagement and that is all to algorithm.

Once you get it, it's easy to keep the shit you don't want in the stream, but not everyone is well versed in algorithmical ways so it's not that hard to get into algorithmics hole

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