861–870 of 890 posts
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Clearly you are unfamiliar with his work and influence. You could easily fix that with a bit of effort.
Actually I've read it and am quite familiar. It's true that he was influential but all of his work was shoddy and poorly reasoned. Only morons are impressed by it.
I suspect the monetary incentives are at cross purposes to my personal incentives. Reddit really has a much nicer experience if you have good internet and several hundred cores but I don't have either, if the "old" reddit goes away I would need some serious upgrades to use it, wierd that they're worse than facebook with their new ui.
Imgur, instagram has no usable interface for me, x is now exclusively the realm of degenerates and whackjobs, I have never once sucessfully loaded a discord page so won't even be affected by their id grab.
there are still a few cool places here and there. I think some smaller sites with similar interfaces to old reddit, hacker news (but with subs) have potential.
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Of course social media influences elections. Direct or indirect, the principle of democracy is the same: the electorate hears a diversity of perspectives and votes according to the ones found most convincing. How can you say you believe in democracy when you want to control what people hear so they don't vote the wrong way? In a democracy there is no such thing as voting the wrong way. Who are you to decide which per…
You write as though the selection of information by algorithmic feeds is a politically neutral act, which comes about by free actions of the people. But this is demonstrably not the case. Selecting hard for misinformation which enrages (because it increases engagement) means that social media are pushing populations further and further to the right. And this serves the interest of the literal handful of billionaires…
You don't get to decide a priori certain electoral outcomes are bad and work backwards to banning information flows to preclude those outcomes.
My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s. I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I di…
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The problem with this is that section 230 was specifically created to promote editorializing. Before section 230, online platforms were loath to engage in any moderation because they feared that a hint of moderation would jump them over into the realm of "publisher" where they could be held liable for the veracity of the content they published and, given the choice between no moderation at all or full editorial respo…
This is the first time I've ever heard somebody claim that section 230 exists to deter child predators. That argument is of course nonsense. If the platform is aware of apparent violations including enticement, grooming etc. they are obligated to report this under federal statute, specifically 18 USC 2258A. Now if you think that statute doesn't go far enough then the right thing to do is amend it, or more broadly, es…
THE MUCH SCARIER cooked state is that of wikipedia and anything noting down history, if we ever uncover something from the past, how the HELL can we know for sure it wasn't AI generated? we are absolutely cooked as a species.
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I'm still a FB user even though most friends and relatives have disengaged due to toxicity. But what I've noticed consistently is that any group on FB that has more than 1000 members will end up surfacing so much toxic sentiment that I have to unsubstantiated. I'm talking about innocuous fields such as the local road conditions. That one became full of rants about out of state drivers, drivers who don't understand En…
> This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size. I think what happens is that the risk of including a critical amount of "toxics" (lacking a better word) such that they can keep a conversation going, increases by FB group size. Without actice moderators it doesn't take much.
And the thing about poorly moderated groups (especially on platforms with rage-boosting algorithms) that let assholes go off without consequences is: the people who both a) actually look at the group ever and b) aren't assholes either leave entirely, stop looking at the group, and stop posting/commenting to the group (if they ever did in the first place). They go find places to hang out where there aren't a bunch of assholes. Nobody wants to hang out with the assholes when they can easily just not.
And at the same time, the assholes all gravitate to the same few places because they get kicked out of all the other places. Or if they don't get kicked out outright, they get shouted down or ignored, which they hate. So instead they congregate where they can get away with or get praised for saying whatever vile things they want.
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Pretty big difference between soda and what's being described, unfortunately. It'd be a more accurate analogy if we replaced soda with opium. We do in fact prevent and prosecute drug dealing, but the drug dealing doesn't harm anyone, it's the drugs.
Drug dealing "harm" is the classic abject shirking of responsibly. Oh no, I'm contacting my dealer, and now going to meet him, and handing cash to him... Oh no poor me this is being done to me by him.. Filth
Filth
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Oh yeah? How is the ceo of your power company? Your refrigerator? Your garage door? I just am very skeptical any of this is based on a harm based model of morality. Instead it smells like concern about perception or status: > You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla
> Other companies that don't have as high profile CEOs can get away with terrible points of view. > > Oh yeah? How is the ceo of your power company? Your refrigerator? Your garage door? If they hide their terrible opinions then its hard to made judgements.