91–100 of 225 posts
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A bit of a paradox, but a tolerant society does not tolerate intolerance.
"paradox of tolerance" is a hypocrisy. If you are intolerant only to the intolerant you are not tolerant, it is as simple as that.
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Oh come now. I constantly hear this concern from my friends (almost exclusively left-of-center). And they aren't totally wrong? I have a qanon-er in my family; she's carefully curated her media sources to guarantee a pure, steady stream of nutjob garbage. The thing is, censoring twitter/facebook/youtube makes no difference - these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look. At least on youtube…
I think there's some nuance here though, where people do make a distinction between opposing views and harmful content. (likely not everyone, but still) What I mean is, I don't care if someone reads a politician I hate. I care if they read a politician who enables the next pizzagate or worse. Or if they read state sponsored misinformation while thinking it's genuine opinions. And yeah, I do acknowledge there's some o…
The printing press was seen as dangerous. Then the phone, then TV, and then the internet. And now it's social media.
Each time the arguments are the same. People worry that the "wrong people" will have the ability to share ideas to a broad audience.
And yet each time we've shown that more speech is correlated with an expansion of civil rights and liberal governance.
With a boost you want to increase the visibility of a post by somebody else. Probably because you agree with it. Something has to happen with that boost signal, otherwise boosting is pointless. Hence, in some way a boosted or often boosted post is promoted over ones that are not boosted.
As the boosted post gets more eye balls, it will get even more boosts. Not necessarily because it's so awesome, simply because it's the post that is shown more prominently.
This simple snowball effect has viral potential, hence it's just as corruptible as Twitter. It can and will be used agenda-driven. Power always consolidates, hence soon you'll have the elitist layer with large followers boosting each other's posts. The other 95% gets zero traction or engagement.
The other downside of boosts, retweets, quote tweets is that it discourages writing your own original posts. More than 80% of what Twitter calls tweet activity is simply retweets, not new tweets.
Finally, if you want organic social media, people to follow should never ever be automatically recommended. This triggers the exact same snowball effect.
If one was to be a purist, you'd remove the boost option. With a boost you want to increase the visibility of a post by somebody else. Probably because you agree with it. Something has to happen with that boost signal, otherwise boosting is pointless. Hence, in some way a boosted or often boosted post is promoted over ones that are not boosted. As the boosted post gets more eye balls, it will get even more boosts. No…
I don't really see a way around this unless you explicitly try to prevent people from posting things that have been posted before. IIRC, retweets were originally just normal tweets that people tacked the letters "RT" in front of. It was an emergent social pattern that got reified into a feature.
> And anyhow, those algorithms are just showing you what you want. Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t be doomscrolling so much, would you? I believe this to be based on a faulty assumption: people do what they want. While it may be true that at the reptile-brain level we do want what the Algorithm feeds us, that statement is equivalent to saying that someone who is addicted to opiates wan…
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> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality. "quality" here meaning accurac…
If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.
If one was to be a purist, you'd remove the boost option. With a boost you want to increase the visibility of a post by somebody else. Probably because you agree with it. Something has to happen with that boost signal, otherwise boosting is pointless. Hence, in some way a boosted or often boosted post is promoted over ones that are not boosted. As the boosted post gets more eye balls, it will get even more boosts. No…
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To your knowledge, you have just used a fallacy called "Argument from authority", a popular demagogue technique. Just because someone wrote in length that white is black, white does not become black. Likewise, intolerance does not become tolerance. You do not tolerate something => you are not tolerant. You oppose free speech only for really horrible people => you oppose free speech. It's really binary, and wherever P…
You probably should read Popper before dismissing his ideas. If you don't want to, it's fine, but in that case it's hard to take your dismissal seriously. Like more or less anything real, this is not a simple binary problem.
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"?
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It's still a hypocrisy, but so what. People say it like it's a damnation of the idea. Things in life are fuzzy, that's why it's literally called a paradox. The most tolerant people in the world are not going to be ok with a 20 year-old having a sexual relationship with their 12 year old daughter because of the danger involved. That's the paradox of intolerance, that everyone has a limit, and if you have no limit, som…
It's ok to be intolerant at some things. What's not ok is to be intolerant and still claim to be tolerant. That's hypocrisy. Also, do not equate actions and speech - and we're mostly arguing about free speech here, right?
The other part of the post - the abuse? That part is harder. Fundamentally, commercial social networks spend a crapload of money and traumatize working-class moderators all over the world trying to keep spammers, scammers, illegal pornography, hatespeech, and worse off their platforms. I don't know how sustainable it is for hobbyists to implement that.
Realistically, I'm expecting that if Mastodon truly takes off, it will gradually bifurcate: 1) Free instances that are hives of scum and villainy 2) Paid instances that are well-moderated and pleasant
Fortunately, Mastodon servers have the ability to federate with other servers in a "second class citizen" sort of way, so members of group 2 will be able to follow people on group 1, but the mayhem of free instances will be purely opt-in on a per-user basis.
I mean Mastodon has a lot of problems. Its tech stack is a nightmare to admin, and it is notoriously wastefully chatty when it comes to server-to-server messaging. But those faults can be fixed.
The social problem is much harder.