141–150 of 361 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t like hanging out on 4chan? It’s not what users want anyway, it is what advertisers want. They don’t want toxic content next to their ads.
Wow , you are very different from most people as most (99.9999?)can’t stand toxic trolls.
> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the pr…
Just because over 10 million Americans believe that Tom Hanks violates, kills, and eats children - a widely held belief - does not mean that a private company can't tell those people to go suck a bug. A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.
I don’t think you have a problem with that, I think you agree with what critics call wokeism.
What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
You do realize that social networks are optional ? No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use them.
do you realize that using the mail service is optional? nobody forces you to write post cards.
do you realize that electricity is optional? you can get a shack in the forest and burn wood.
do you realize that water pipes are optional? you can dig for your own ground water.
the world is not made of solipsistic individuals. infrastructure encases, shapes, and forms the possibilities and constraints in which all of us live.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, you have no problem, I assume, with the "woke" governors banning or revising classic children's books to remove anything offensive? Right? You know, to prevent "government employees and licensed child educators from providing certain books to children, in the context of government mandated education." I'll wait.
This seems like a great case against public education, since the mechanism to address this "whoever is in power decides" situation is of course competition and free choice. Indoctrination of children is just natural a natural consequence of everyone having their biases. Parents are the ones who should choose, because that is how we have diversity. Home schooling gives parents the most choice, private school a step do…
But it absolutely points to the problem of government in education. I don’t think most people realize how recently the schools came under the thumb of the federal government. Department of Education only started in 1980 and it hasn’t exactly raised the bar in that time.
It places constraints on educators (the experts) which make it easy to administer but harder for the educators to educate.
Why is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all. A central server is better if they have a good moderation plan built in. This whole decentralized idea is to wash their hands off moderation and not take a blame for the hellhole it will become. From a pure functional point of view, how can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? What am I missing?
Why can't it just be like message boards like Xenforo and PHPbb? There are numerous sports-related boards created 10+ years ago on that old tech that are still handling thousands of users concurrently.
They're also well moderated too; that's something that becomes impossible if you are trying to manage hundreds of thousands of users.
What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
You do realize that social networks are optional ? No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use them.
What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
Usenets were the first social networks, but their monetization scheme didn't allow for mega international companies to exist: they were paid for to ISPs and ISPs only pay other ISPs for traffic, they don't pay for individual services.
Email used to be the same way... sigh.
Web became the platform that enabled for advertisement to be mixed into the product. I cannot tell if Hotmail or similar saw the promise of ads on the Web, or did they "accidentally" succeed -- whichever the case, it's the Web that took over other Internet applications because it made it possible to monetize it in a different and a more scalable way.
Ideally, we'd have an Internet application for social networks, instead of it being a Web application. So that we pay our ISP for usage. We just really don't have that kind of application (yet?) And, I'm not sure ISPs are thrilled about this (will the effort be worth the revenues?). Definitely, companies like Meta aren't interested in that, as that would undermine their core business.
But then, who knows... ad spam seems to be able to find its way no matter the technology. You can think about SMS as being similar to an Internet application, and you do get spam ads over SMS too.
Another problem of social network as Internet application would be the search. Search works better when it's governed by a single entity which cares about indexing the data in various ways. If it's distributed, that'd be very challenging to implement, especially because it wouldn't be clear who's responsible for storing the indices and who pays whom in the end.
Another challenge would be the connection between user's identity and their ISP... well, there are a lot of things that would need work, but I don't think it's not possible overall. In legislative terms, we'd need to recognize social networks as a service similar to postal service, and regulate it accordingly...
What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?
Social networks are hotels, right. - First they are new and cool. The young, hip and rich stay often. - New becomes old. Shoddy carpet, old fixtures, bad music in the lobby but older people stay until they die. - New hotels sprout up with cool carpet, music and fixtures. The cycle repeats. The only way we can ditch them is to ban them and then they’ll go underground :( What is dead may never die.
Why is this obsession with decentralized? I don’t see the benefits of it at all. A central server is better if they have a good moderation plan built in. This whole decentralized idea is to wash their hands off moderation and not take a blame for the hellhole it will become. From a pure functional point of view, how can a decentralized network provide any performance guarantee? What am I missing?
^ This is the reason decentralized is better for everyone, including Meta. At a certain scale, content moderation goes from "hard" to "actually impossible."
With enough users, you will eventually have an Kurdish knitting group that meets in Turkey, who uses ethnic slurs ironically as a commentary on the government's treatment of immigrants, and you'll have to unravel the whole thing when someone complains. And the whole conversation is happening in Kurdish.