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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

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Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#951

Post by simondotau »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #849
simondotau wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Horrific. Wikipedia is one of the very few large entities on the web left that are not actively harming the species.

In terms of species-level harm arising from the ways their systems can be abused, I’d rank them roughly as follows. To be clear, I’m ranking a platform’s potential for species-level harm based on its scale and its ability to concentrate, enforce, or algorithmically amplify a shared narrative or behaviour while limiting meaningful challenge or escape.

  S-tier: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube [shorts, recommendations]
  A-tier: Facebook
  B-tier: Wikipedia, Reddit
  C-tier: X, YouTube [subscriptions]
  D-tier: Most major LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT.
  Null-tier: Bluesky, Truth Social, Mastodon, etc. (too irrelevant to have any meaningful species-level effect.)
I can imagine how this analysis might look bonkers at first blush. But I strongly account for how much disagreement is surfaced. Say what you will about X, at least the arguments are visible for all to see. By contrast, the proportion of Wikipedia readers who also read the talk pages to understand active disputes probably rounds to zero.

LLMs such as ChatGPT are problematic because they can reflect and reinforce prevailing views embedded across their source material, most significantly Wikipedia. But their conversational nature provides an important escape hatch: you can challenge an answer, interrogate its assumptions, ask for competing interpretations, and explore multiple perspectives.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#952

Post by simondotau »

nozzlegear wrote: post #938
simondotau wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It suffers from the same fundamental flaw as a self-selected poll: the people most motivated to participate are not necessarily representative, impartial or even particularly reasonable. What appears like a diverse community of fair, objective and well-intentioned people is nothing of the sort. The community-driven model necessarily means that control of narrative rewards persistence and an aptitude for social engine…

That makes sense, thanks for explaining! Sounds a lot like the overly-opinionated reddit mod problem.

The key difference is that Reddit has never been treated like a synonym for objectivity.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#953

Post by simondotau »

smaudet wrote: post #914
simondotau wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet, wikipedia is not owned by... That is a red herring. A corporation can act ethically. A charity can act disgracefully. A government can protect people. A neighbourhood association can bully them. A billionare can be philanthropic. A group of children can terrorise a community.

Your "counter" is nonsensical - if you are referring to the concept of a logical "red herring", something to distract by introducing an irrelevant topic, this is not that. Your comment pertained to your (dislike of) use of wikipedia in contrast to the relevant site (X.com). My comment pertains to both of the relevant websites you had related (wikipedia is no more related to x.com than governments, neighborhoods, etc.…

You substituted a different question ("who owns the platform") for the one I originally raised ("how its information and narratives are governed in practice"). Call that a red herring or simply a non sequitur; the label isn't important. It didn't rebut the argument.

You're missing the point of those examples. Of course you can reverse them -- and that is precisely my point! Organisational form or ownership tells you very little, by itself, about whether an institution behaves well. My criticism of Wikipedia concerned how authority over contested information emerges and is exercised. "But Wikipedia isn't owned by an evil oligarch" doesn't answer that criticism.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#955

Post by mitxela »

Plont wrote: post #784
mitxela wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is social media.

I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here. I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately. As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an…

Could you make your own HN?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#956

Post by prolly97 »

ITT. Non-X users complaining that they can't use X. If you don't like the content on X enough to make an account, I don't see how this is a big loss.

And yes I've on occasion had the same thought with TikTok - it'd be nice to see the vids that people send me, without making an account. But I'll just have to live my life without having seen that one super funny/interesting/enlightening video, or have to ask for a summary :)

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#957

Post by simondotau »

vrganj wrote: post #891
simondotau wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.

That's not what the data says: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...

That's what some motivated cable news researchers decided to abuse statistics to say. To be generous, I would say the article makes a significantly stronger causal claim than the experiment supports. The best description is a good exploratory algorithm audit with weak statistical and causal inference.

The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#958

Post by Meneth »

classified wrote: post #945
runjake wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These browser extensions still work: For Chrome: https://github.com/tsvb/post-peek For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dumpster-fire... For Safari: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox

Don't you still have to log in to xitter with those?

No, but they are limited. Longer tweets are cut off, and you don't get to see replies.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#959

Post by Melatonic »

prolly97 wrote: post #956

ITT. Non-X users complaining that they can't use X. If you don't like the content on X enough to make an account, I don't see how this is a big loss. And yes I've on occasion had the same thought with TikTok - it'd be nice to see the vids that people send me, without making an account. But I'll just have to live my life without having seen that one super funny/interesting/enlightening video, or have to ask for a summ…

It's more that tons of local services (like firefighting updates) directly post their latest updates there

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#960

Post by ben_w »

prolly97 wrote: post #956

ITT. Non-X users complaining that they can't use X. If you don't like the content on X enough to make an account, I don't see how this is a big loss. And yes I've on occasion had the same thought with TikTok - it'd be nice to see the vids that people send me, without making an account. But I'll just have to live my life without having seen that one super funny/interesting/enlightening video, or have to ask for a summ…

> If you don't like the content on X enough to make an account

The content itself isn't the problem, it's the website.

Other people keep linking me to X posts they want to share.

The website is so bad that it (was) faster to manually change the URL even on my phone than to let the browser try to load the original.

Now I ask people to share screenshots of the posts instead of sending links.

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