Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even free speech has its limits It doesnt though, thats the point. Its the same as competition in a capitalist marketplace. A company can sell terrible products and what should happen is people see they are terrible products and vote with their wallet to stop buying. Then the company goes out of business. With free speech if somebody is saying something that other people think is terrible, they should stop listenin…
> > Even free speech has its limits > It doesnt though, thats the point. In theory. But in practive even the most staunch pro-free speech jurisdictions have limits on them. A lot for good reasons that most people would agree with (threats and fraud, stuff like that), but also some that would be absurd in other jurisdictions (obscenities for example, which is usually very locality specific). There's a Wikipedia page w…
X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
611–620 of 834 posts
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you buried the lede in your footnote here. Even if it is just a mistake, it's a pretty avoidable one by having a human in the loop to review changes to start blocking URLs to such a commonly linked site. If he thinks that it's "efficient" not to retain enough people to be able to notice that URL fragments and hashtags use the same symbol, he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near an "office of government efficien…
Humans aren’t in the loop for automated bans. That has no relationship to staffing size. This is likely a problem with the link banning algo not treating signal.me as high volume enough to prevent an automated ban. That same logic most definitely exists at well-staffed companies and the internet is full of stories of people getting screwed by these systems. Google sinking legit companies with no recourse, locking out…
My point is that this _shouldn't_ have been purely automated, but having fewer people to review things forces more things to be automated.
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#613Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even personally, you couldn't possibly know whether it's positive or negative for a random stranger on the Internet, because it depends on how much they use it and what they use it for. For example, keeping a Twitter account in case someone wants to contact you seems pretty harmless.
Well, sure, if you're exceptionally picky about non-normative use cases you can probably find a use for it that is not harmful to the average person. But you're doing a lot of heavy lifting already to justify a positive use case (contacting a person you apparently have no other way of reaching, which isn't in the top 3 of primary use cases for X). Anyway, I was speaking in the aggregate. X (so, post Elon) has been ba…
But I think it's bad for your mental health to lose perspective about it. It all adds up, but it's 99.999% other people doing the adding, and unless you're in the right position to use leverage, you are mostly an observer of national and global events.
This means that morally, you don't need to feel responsible for big stuff like that - unless you see a way to end up in a position where you have that kind of leverage.
Using big, negative events as justification to scold random nearby individuals is mostly just making your local community more unpleasant.
Example: I do encourage people to vote, but I'm not going to worry about one voter more or less.
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
As you point out, "honest mistake" can be used by sophisticated intentional aggressors to get away with their attacks. For a long time, the advice was "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." but aggressors evolve to fit their surroundings. When the population largely follows this rule, it becomes a competitive advantage to fake incompetence. Perhaps both malice and incompetence sh…
I like to add the statement, "Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice."
FTFY :)
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#616Do people in the US still use X? If yes, why? What keeps you on the platform (so the owner is a tiny step closer to destroying your own country)?
> Do people in the US still use X? If yes, why? Are you seriously asking that question? If so, I suggest looking at the nov election results. The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election).
There's an incredibly long list of reasons to ditch x beyond musk's political activity
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#617Do people in the US still use X? If yes, why? What keeps you on the platform (so the owner is a tiny step closer to destroying your own country)?
i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money
>i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money
If you're concerned about the federal government bankrupting "us" by stealing our money then ask yourself why one of the first things that happened was the firing of OIG personnel. The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size. They have the power to audit any recipient of taxpayer monies and to work with US Attorney federal prosecutors to prosecute those who steal, waste, or otherwise violate plan guidelines in disbursing money. US Attorneys will not even take a case to trial unless agency auditors can document in detail that a crime has occurred and that crime fits within prosecutorial guidelines and a conviction is nearly guaranteed. To take a case that has any weaknesses risks wasting public money prosecuting a case you might not win. The whole point is to make sure you have the evidence that forces the defendant to either make restitution or to spend some time in a federal lock-up.
It's suspicious to me that the first thing they do is fire all the people who not only can watch, but who have the Congressional mandate to seek out waste, fraud, and abuse of federal programs that disburse money to individuals, small businesses, cities and other non-federal entities, non-profits, and corporations.
Though I am not a doctor, I do think that you should seriously work on your mental health. Start by changing your diet to include less kool-aid as the sugar high you're on can cause metabolic changes that lead to seriously bad health outcomes.
My spouse has spent a career in a federal department working to insure that the money Congress allocates to specific programs ends up being spent for purposes that are allowed under the guidelines of those federal programs. If you think the federal government is the one stealing your money you are sadly mistaken.
Federal programs are full of fraud but the fraud occurs at the recipient end, not within the department.
If you or anyone else are so concerned about where your tax money goes then the last agency entity that you would eliminate would be the one charged with insuring that all the monies in all the programs administered by the agency are disbursed lawfully according to plan guidelines which were approved by Congress. These people, as part of their job, have to read and internalize all the nuances, conflicts with existing programs, and contradictions in all the programs that they serve as watchdog over and it is their skills that allow federal prosecutors to take fraud cases to trial and to convict those who have abused federal programs for personal gain.
You voted for someone who has a documented history of fraudulent use of federal money who made it a point in both of his administrations to remove the specific persons and agencies that would guarantee oversight so that they can do anything without worrying about accountability. Internalize that.
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#618Do people in the US still use X? If yes, why? What keeps you on the platform (so the owner is a tiny step closer to destroying your own country)?
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but what does that proves? That proves that its ok to criticise Musk on Twitter/X, which is what the OP was denying.
All the people he banned for criticizing him say otherwise.
Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will go with "legitimate f-up" too. Elon Musk has been pretty vocal about Signal in the past, mostly positively. If blocking Signal URLs has been intentional, he would have probably have mentioned it somewhere. Shortened URLs are dubious by default. It is also possible that there really is a lot of spam/scam happening on Signal right now with signal.me URLs as an entry point. I mean, why not? Every messaging platfo…
Are links to mastodon still banned on twitter? Because that was a thing after Musk took over. So much for being a free speech absolutist. You're making the mistake of taking a (communal + antagonistic) narcissist at face value. They are known to lie to suit their current goals and when those goals are achieved, they will lie to suit their new goals, whether the lies are congruent with each other or not. This is a guy…
A narcissist wants to be the center of attention, by definition, and you are actually playing his game here. A "legitimate f-up" is the worst for a narcissist, as it would show he is nothing special, and incompetent.
That's why I go with the "legitimate f-up" explanation. There is no clear intent, it lacks flair, and it can just cause a mild controversy at best. Though I am still pissed that it turned out to be something about Elon Musk again and not Twitter/X. As much as a "nanomanager" he likes to call himself, he is not the only one working at Twitter/X, there are still people with some responsibilities there. It is not all a masterplan by Elon Musk.
As for banning links to other platforms like Mastodon, it was mentioned explicitly on the Twitter Support account that "we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter", followed by a list of platforms that included Mastodon, but not Signal. I don't think it is still the case, and I am not aware of anything similar regarding a ban on signal.me links.