321–330 of 351 posts
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The moderation by Russian government isn’t something I would wish to any culture.
The US is already at Soviet levels: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-ameri...
There is a wide spectrum of news you can trivially read, from Fox to BBC to tons of small blogs.
If you want to be anywhere near Soviet levels, you want to eliminate all viewpoints except one. Until you do this, you are not even close.
In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions/billions of users is a fool's errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we've ended up with. Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to hav…
There is no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be. The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will never be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries. Ho…
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There is no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be. The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will never be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries. Ho…
Your reply kinda implies that "entire world" is spanned from SF to Texas. Anecdotally, I just returned from Egypt vacation trip. Go figure how to moderate black 14 years orthodox christian sugarcane worker, who is writing in Arabic script.
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Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists? So if I never want to see anything from Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos and the like, I just subscribe to a blocklist that eliminates far right commentators. You could even create networks of trusted users where anyone they block, is blocked for everyone in the network. Or have shareable rulesets, like "block anyone who uses this word", or "block anyone who follows…
> Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists? Not a fan of this. I've found myself banned a couple times, only to find out I likely got caught up someones blocklist that put out a large blanket block on anyone friends with someone who followed someone else. Or some similar indirect nonsense. The idea being you're isolating yourself from someone who's friends with an asshole, so you're less likely to encounter…
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/13711918852686725... > What's possible is a Twitter staffer tried to block a street address, but the postal syntax acted as an escape sequence, or the original was multi-line and they only pasted the city. What postal syntax in the US looks like an escape sequence?
I meant separator token, sorry.
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There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don't bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring zero attention to them. Trolls' game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they'll cease to bother you much. Thi…
This approach only works if they don’t care about you. There’s a couple of decades of history by now showing how this approach fails, ranging from mass harassment (want to spend weeks blocking randos and sock puppets?) to attempts to contact your family and coworkers up to in-person harassment, placing Craigslist ads with your address saying you have violent rape fantasies, and SWATing. This is, of course, unevenly d…
Furthermore, some of us actually know the participants involved in a professional and private capacity.
Yes, Gjoni "did a bad thing" by posting all the duplicitous shitty things Quinn did... but therein lies the rub. If you don't want to be called out for being a cheater who fucks game journalists for good reviews... then don't cheat on your boyfriend and fuck game journalists for reviews. It really is that goddamn simple.
What GamerGate really was, was that gamers - the naive idiots they tend to be - found out that their little subculture was NOT immune to all the awful shit that plagues every other human interest. They, however, decided to start fighting back instead of just shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Oh well, everything's corrupt and awful, what can you do?"
But the real root cause problem here is that people don't want to accept human nature, almost all people, on almost all sides.
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You're going to use Reddit as an example, where the people least deserving of power are given it, freely, and end up banning people for merely having different opinions? I would not have used that in my list. It doesn't boil down to a "concession I don't prefer". The only thing you moderate are those things deemed illegal by the Federal government, anything else is fair game, which brings us a pretty large umbrella o…
> Some people don't want to engage in those discussions because they're hard and/or unpleasant. They not required to, and can freely leave them and ignore them. They did leave, and then they made the new space where those discussion are not tolerated. We are talking inside one of such places. Some people don't want to understand that there are discussion places which limit certain topics. They are not required to, an…
Twitter and Facebook aren't such spaces.
They're both based on models of unlimited growth, which means you're going to have unlimited viewpoints, which means you're going to have to #DealWithIt.
What you want, can be done on Hacker News because we're a focused community and most of us all have similar jobs, come from similar backgrounds, etc., or at least, there's enough of us that work in tech and enough of us that went to good schools that we're a more or less cohesive community with fairly similar values.
You don't have that with 5 billion users, sorry.
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Just a small anecdote: I created a company account, then set the birthday to ~1 year ago, when the company was registered. Everything was fine for 5 minutes, then my account has been blocked with a notification telling me that I need to be at least 13 years old to use Twitter. I can still login but cannot access the settings to change the birthday (or just remove it) as a screen “fix your age or prove your identity”…
Similar story: I finally created an account last week and after a few minutes of looking around, I tried to follow 1 person and got locked out. It requires a phone number to the unlock the account now. Just feels like gratuitous extortion of personal data. Also, seriously asking: Why does it even let you create an account with email if it will force you to give a phone number anyway?
In general it seems like moderating platforms with millions/billions of users is a fool's errand, but is required to be attempted due to the level of centralization we've ended up with. Regardless of how much of it is automated away via blackbox ML algorithms lacking transparency or via outsourcing to cheap labor that spends their days looking at terribly offensive and shocking content, the end result is going to hav…
There is no way to moderate the entire world. The sooner everyone alive accepts this, the better off we will be. The values of a Black lesbian female software developer who grew up in San Francisco and went to Stanford will never be compatible with the values of a Hispanic straight male Marine officer who grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas Christian University and has been deployed to 17 different countries. Ho…
They do not want to learn to engage anybody they disagree with, and as long as they control most of the platforms, along with the academia, the education sector, the entertainment sector, serious part of the government institutions and significant part of the corporate boards - there is no reason for them to engage anyone, as soon as they can just suppress and deplatform whoever they like. Might makes right, at least for them.
Of course, there's no technology on Earth - at least not yet - to make dissenting voices completely silent. But that's not the point. The point is to make them orders of magnitude weaker, so they would not be able to influence anything. You can talk to your friends in your kitchen, if you want, while your opponents will have an access to billions strong audience. You can set up your puny webserver (provided your ISP and your DNS provider do not deplatform you, and your bank does not deny you access to payment systems) - and you'll be competing with the combined powers of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and such. Do you think they would feel compelled to "engage" you, to evolve and change their ways to account for your existence - or would they just crush you like a tiny insect, and not even notice it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a well-known recipe against trolls: do not feed them. Block and ignore them. If you visit a bathroom, you normally don't bloviate about the kind of crap you had just to flush, you rather avoid the topic; the same applies to trolls. Bring zero attention to them. Trolls' game is all about drawing attention, in the form of ire, offense, and and panic. Deprive them this, and they'll cease to bother you much. Thi…
What happens if the trolls decide to bring explosives to blow up your Buddha statue?