“Stop trying to make Mastodon happen. It’s not going to happen.”
Protect me from what I want
161–170 of 225 posts
Re: Protect me from what I want
#162An algorithm that I can tune by having private +1, -1, and "hell no" buttons would be helpful. If I follow too many people and/or hashtags, I will end up with so many posts/toots that I spend a bunch of time reading through things that really aren't that interesting. If I had a way to easily mark content as interesting or not, an algorithm could construct my feed such that the things that I find interesting are more…
What you are describing is similar to how my hobby project works: https://linklonk.com
When you upvote content (+1) you make your connection stronger to those who posted that content and also those who also upvoted it. When you downvote (-1), your connection to the poster and other upvoters becomes weaker. The content in your feed is ranked base on how strongly you are connected to those who upvoted the content.
For example, I upvoted the OP post on LinkLonk: https://linklonk.com/item/3406294698351951872. If you upvote that item then you will get connected to me and to two RSS feeds that posted that content: the blog's feed (https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom) and the the HN's feed of newest items (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss). As a result you will start to see other content from those RSS feeds and from my "main" channel more prominently in your recommendations.
Users can post/submit links under different user channels. So if your hypothetical E2E person were to post E2E stuff under their "E2E" channel while keeping the furry stuff under their "furry" channel then you would only get connected to their E2E channels if you only +1'd content from that channel.
Re: Protect me from what I want
#163It seems to me that there is a "solution" that goes completely unspoken in these conversations.
There's the one side that says, "don't do anything opaque, just show me a chrono-timeline, I'll deal with the deluge myself". And another side that says, "you delusional to think you can deal with a deluge".
But maybe there is a third position: don't get into a deluge in the first place. Maybe the answer is actually that we shouldn't be trying to follow thousands of people on social media. Maybe there is no meaningful way to keep track of that many people and still be able to existentially understand them as, ahem, people anymore.
So far, my experience on Mastodon is bearing this out. I have almost exactly 10% of the followership on Mastodon than I do on Twitter. Yet I'm easily having 5x more conversations. The quality of those conversations is very significantly better, but I'll leave that hairy ball of unquantifiability by the wayside for now. So far, "engagement" on Mastodon is 50x better than on Twitter.
Re: Protect me from what I want
#164I completely agree with the article. There is a vast soup of user generated content that could be displayed and there's always an algorithm of some sort employed, even if that algorithm is "show me only content from people I explicitly follow and sort it chronologically". If you wanted to give the social media companies the benefit of the doubt, you would say "they just want to have a feed that the user enjoys and th…
I think this “marketplace of algorithms” idea (aka algorithmic choice) is a bit naive. Imagine using an app for the first time. What algorithm do you choose? Now remove your technical context and imagine reading through the top 10 algorithms to make a choice of which one to select. Twitter actually has quite a few knobs for curation (eg you can apply Regexps to filter content), and Id be very interested in knowing how many users actually use those features. Id guess its a rounding error.
Re: Protect me from what I want
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument..." That's Popper. Does that sound like "we can't let people speak"? Or would that actually be more in the lines of "we should expose their followers to the arguments their leaders don't want them to see"?
People who don't fear physical violence make this argument all the time. They don't know why it's wrong, because again, they do not fear violence. Speech is just things on the internet, that aren't actually real. They don't get doxxed, they can't be identified in a crowd, they can blend with whatever the majority is. It is very easy to defend "free speech absolutism" when you're not the target of hate speech. When yo…
This is a complete strawman. I'm muslim, born in a muslim country, and am living in the west yet I absolutely agree with the person you are replying to. Muslims are targeted by hate speech constantly, and there was a period in time (like, 3-4 years ago) when that was particularly intense. Much more so than almost any other minority, and in a much more concrete way (christchurch, travel bans, secret prisons, etc)
Yet, I still would agree with a free speech absolutist much more so than with someone who thinks they know best about what speech is ok or not. And that's precisely because I'm a minority. I know that having a gatekeeper that decides what is or what isn't hate speech is never a good idea in the long run except if you belong to the majority who ultimately gets to decide what speech is ok or not.
It is also quite ironic to use "stochastic terrorism" (which is a dangerous term in and by itself) as a justification for your argument. It's a complete regurgitation of early 2000s talking points, especially to imply that those who disagree with you are turning a blind eye to some form of terrorism. In a way, it proves my point about being suspicious of any attempt to restrict free speech. Because it's the same exact tactic that was used to prop up islamophobia and justify human rights violations (I mean, who would want to turn a blind eye to terrorism, right?!).
Re: Protect me from what I want
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> …it’s factually true and relevant to the context. this is factually true? what exactly is a “coastal media type”?
Large US news companies have their staff largely in areas like California, New York, etc. because US media conglomerates are concentrated in those areas. Eg, WarnerMedia who is the parent company of CNN — a news agency that’s undergone substantial cuts under a new CEO due to its bias.
if you expand that etc a little bit you'll see the problem. cities in coastal states are pretty close to a majority of the population.
Re: Protect me from what I want
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the last comment by the other person, it sounds like they're not going to answer. I'll answer for them (at my peril): > "calls to censor misinformation in media"[...] are you implying that journalists should be forced to report misinformation? No, they weren't saying that. > and if they choose _not_ to report misinformation, they're censoring? Also no.
when considering the context from above, what do you think they were implying?
Nothing. Looking for subtext is an error on your part. The words they wrote were what they meant.
Re: Protect me from what I want
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me. The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter. And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across…
> (parent) Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that. > What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit. If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly il…
Copyright violations are a violations against a legal abstraction. Deepfakes are a new form of deception (I didn't imply sexual deepfakes). I used the language of "minors" to explicitly reference those gray legal areas around boundaries and teens sexting each other (which has landed those children in legal quagmires). None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated".
> "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.
I'll admit again: I was quite happy when accounts supporting and promoting ISIS were banned from various social networks. I was more active on social media then (less so now), and it made me feel very uncomfortable to be on the same platform being leveraged to the ends of those radicals. They were just using it so _gleefully_.
I don't know if I'll be accused of wanting to control what people read, because that's what that is. But I think that falls into the political views most of us agree we don't mind if a social network purges. Violent revolutionary religious politics. It's somewhat natural that they'd have a business interest in maybe not hosting that stuff.
So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary? Companies should be free to police those political accounts, but less free to police others? Is it a sliding scale or a hard boundary? Who determines the degree of violence? Is implied violence included? If so how do we determine implied violence?
I'm not attempting to answer those questions. I'm saying those are the questions that a statement to the effect of "You want to control speech (and I don't)" is trying to avoid.
That said, those questions are hard, and maybe arguing about them and answering them actually requires a long time and a lot of consideration and doesn't fit neatly into a hacker news thread.
Re: Protect me from what I want
#169An algorithm that I can tune by having private +1, -1, and "hell no" buttons would be helpful. If I follow too many people and/or hashtags, I will end up with so many posts/toots that I spend a bunch of time reading through things that really aren't that interesting. If I had a way to easily mark content as interesting or not, an algorithm could construct my feed such that the things that I find interesting are more…
I think it's actually important for you to see all the sick shit. I think it's worth rubbing your nose in it.
It's amazing how many technologists have a strong preference for truth in so many areas, but choose not understanding things they find disgusting and why they find them disgusting.
Re: Protect me from what I want
#170I completely agree with the article. There is a vast soup of user generated content that could be displayed and there's always an algorithm of some sort employed, even if that algorithm is "show me only content from people I explicitly follow and sort it chronologically". If you wanted to give the social media companies the benefit of the doubt, you would say "they just want to have a feed that the user enjoys and th…
I think this “marketplace of algorithms” idea (aka algorithmic choice) is a bit naive. Imagine using an app for the first time. What algorithm do you choose? Now remove your technical context and imagine reading through the top 10 algorithms to make a choice of which one to select. Twitter actually has quite a few knobs for curation (eg you can apply Regexps to filter content), and Id be very interested in knowing ho…
I envision it not as a configurable app, but instead each approach to algorithmic feeds is a separate app/website. All the apps have all the underlying fediverse/activitypub data available for them to serve up, but each has a different approach to curating content. Users would just choose the type of experience they want by choosing different apps/websites.