this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
757 points (90.4% liked)
Technology
59709 readers
1889 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I get that this is a contentious topic and I agree that Musk gets too much coverage, but....I strongly believe that people should be able to post whatever they want as long as it adheres to the community's topic (technology) and adheres to the rules.
The arguement of, "I don't wanna see {topic here} so stop posting about {topic here}" is a really slippery slope. Clearly there are quiet users here that DO actually want to hear about X news and DO want to dicuss it. What about topics that appeal to you, or like 20% of the community, but 80% couldn't give a shit? Where is the line?
Realistically, this is on you. You don't like it? Downvote and scroll past it. Want a perfectly curated source of news you care about? Use an RSS reader that offers topic filters. This is a community of diverse interests that may not always reflect yours. Deal with it, or go elsewhere.
That's an even bigger contentious debate. And the fact that there is no one mutually agreed on answer means we either need a formal definition in the rules or the people in this community need to understand that there are people that exist with a broader or narrower definition of technology than they have.
That said, like it or not, go to any major tech blog, podcast, YouTuber, and they all talking about X / Twitter. The tech communities outside of Lemmy have all agreed that Twitter / X is technology. And Lemmy doesn't live in a bubble.
This is an "appeal to authority" logical fallacy.
Personally I think an argument that "Twitter / X is technology" is a very, very difficult argument to make. It's a social media company. Is every company that has a website "tech"?
It's also a generalisation. Perhaps if twitter invented a new decentralised database that might be "tech", but marketing decisions are not.
Marketing decisions of a tech company are valid to be discussed. We discuss marketing and other business decisions of many tech companies and will continue to do so. Your argument is invalid - you're not the arbiter of what are and what aren't valid discussion subjects.
How is twitter a tech company ?
https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/22/technology/social/twitter-isis/index.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/is-twitter-a-technology-platform-a-media-company-or-both-3603227.html
the debate rages on. Frankly, I think you're moronic to complain about Twitter here. They are regularly influencing tech media reporting and they launched as a tech stock.
I think it would help define it or give examples of what it is or isn't intended to include. Should it include biotech, materials tech, or is it limited to computers, Internet, AI? Or...?
Technology to me includes things like papyrus and typewriters and the above and much more. But what I expect to see in a technology community is narrower than that.
....but that's what happens when you call a community "technology". Its a pretty damn broad category and these days, incredibly mainstream.
Communities like " technology" are going to be as mainstream as they were on Reddit. There is nothing you can do about it unless you convince the mods to spend 14 hours a day curating and removing posts from people with mainstream definitions.
If you want a more curated definition, or you have more niche interests, then you probably want to go to a different community. Heck, maybe start your own. Be the change you want to see.
It seems a bit silly to go to a community called "technology" and then complain that it represents what 90% of technology news sources are talking about.
Typewriters are technology, but information about what color of shoes is being worn by the guy who bought the typewriter patent from its inventor isn't technology.
You asked
anything including and beyond hitting a nut with a rock to open it
What defines "real piece of shit?"
What defines "nuts"
There are plenty of people who would call Lemmy a "real piece of shit" and all of us "nuts".
It seems a lot of people here think that anyone who runs a Web site is a tech company.
Go to any tech site, publication, podcast YouTuber, etc. All of them are talking about Twitter. Mainstream tech has agreed that Twitter / Facebook are tech.
Im not saying I agree. I'm not saying even that I care about these topics. I don't. I think Musk is an idiot and actively avoid news about his BS. But clearly a lot of people do care and a lot of people agree that Twitter is tech.
If this community wants to specify a definition of tech that differs from the mainstream, then they need to put it in the rules and accept that we need to control the acceptable conversation because certain members of the community are getting triggered by having to scroll past posts related to Musk or his properties.
This argument is kind of saying "/c/technology should contain any topics which are interesting to people subscribed to /c/technology".
We're not a publication, podcast, or youtuber. This is a community aggregating posts about the topic of choice. We're not trying to gather up users by posting things that are interesting to our existing users.
This statement indicates that what is technology is decided by popular opinion, not by any inherent meaning in words. Certainly the meaning of words change with time and they have no inherent meaning, so in a very real sense, definitions are decided by popular vote. However, if Twitter is a tech company, then so is every newspaper, magazine, bank, credit card company, any business with a data base for inventory management. It's a useless definition. Let's go with the actual mainstream definition of a tech company, a company that develops, produces, licenses or sells technology or technology services, and Twitter doesn't do any of that. It sells ad space and subscriptions, the business model of a media company.
Friendo....
That's how language works. Language evolves and adapts over time via social pressure. Nobody uses words exactly as they are defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. Words are given meaning by people and inevitably those meanings shift and change as people use them in new and different ways.
Just because you adopted pedantry in order to push out topics you hate hearing about doesn't mean everyone else has to adopt your constructed definitions.
they... do? it's like the "what is art" debate. the answer is "whatever you want it to mean in that moment and it can be different in the next moment"
So news of an online store doing shady shit constitutes as "tech news" because they run a web site? Strictly speaking the wheel is also technology, so a post about the history of the wheel seems like a worthy post in a tech community? We might as well post anything here because almost everything you use in your daily life is either technology or related to technology. While I do understand the philosophical aspect of the answer it has no practical value when it comes to defining what kind of content should be posted here.
There needs to be a more practical understanding of what the community considers "tech" so that wrong kind of posts don't get spammed here. For me personally the internet has been around for most of my life. It's not some new a shiny thing, it's as common as the wheel. Therefor I don't consider just running a bog standard website "tech". Similarly I don't consider Twitter / X a tech company, they're a social media company that uses software as a tool. I haven't considered anything about Twitter, except firing the engineers, as tech news since Musk wanted to buy Twitter. Maybe even before Musk tried to buy it, but who remembers things from eons ago. If there was news about some kind of exploit on Twitter or a data breach, that I could consider tech news because that is generally related to the actual tech they are using for their business. But a Twitter rebrand? Has literally nothing to do with tech beyond the tools they used constituting as "tech". But then we're back to square one where I could post about a new bicycle coming out, because the wheels bicycles use are "tech" and the frame material being used is produced by "tech" and there's a lot of "tech" that goes into a bicycle. But somehow I doubt this is what the community cares about.
Your point is absolutely valid, but what's happening at Twitter really is only relevant to social media news. There's no tech changing or advancing, just a really bad marketing decision. I personally do not believe that this is tech news or relevant to it.
I agree. It's more political than technology related.
Its either Business or Political not tech
To be fair it's a tech company though so it can impact those in the tech space. Generally it doesn't but you know what I mean.
What rss reader are you using? I've been using feeder and have like it so far. Also have freshRSS running but don't use it so much
I've tried so many and I'm always on the hunt for better ones. I wss on Pallabre until it went abandonware. Currently on inoreader but still hunting.
Problem is that I want something that can easily sync my feed and subscriptions across devices, but the ones that support that compromise in other areas. I might need to just settle for good import/export functionality. But Inoreader works for me for now.
But the nice thing is there are a ton of RSS apps out there. So, theres bound to be something for everyone.
Politely disagree, in that I suspect this is a hypocritical sentiment. Most users who get off of Elon news will agree with this position now but then cry foul when this community is spammed with a subject not to their liking. And as much as the ideology of free speech (rightly) resonates, just like with free markets, some minimal regulation is needed in practice; otherwise some fanatics could choke this feed up with, I dunno, 99% Microsoft news, all the time, and you wouldn't be able to say shit because you "strongly believe people should be able to post whatever they want". I doubt that you would stand by your lofty convictions so strongly then.
Beyond that, there is nothing wrong with expressing a desire for more or less of something—it's just an opinion. It's a bullshit argument to say, "If you don't like it, instead of articulating why, just use the limited non-descriptive tool provided to reduce your passionate sentiment into a trivial binary value and cast it into the sea of thousands just like it; or else, like, go create an entirely new community or a custom feed or whatever you want. But mainly, just fuck off."
Let me make this clear.
I don't give a FLYING FUCK about Elon. I actively ignore any posts about him or his shitty empire. Stop using the behaviors of his idiot stans to argue with me. I am not them.
What I do care about is a community telling people what they can or cannot post, not through rules changes, not through mod action, but by agreeing internally to bully every person who dares to post what every tech publication is talking about.
I think you need to evaluate why you let this shit trigger you. I mean, this is like going to a coffee shop and raising a stink because they sell pumpkin spice lattes. Don't consume it. Use Lemmy's tools to filter it out if you really need to.
Its not the community's job to cater to your specific content desires. This isn't a news site. Its a place for people to talk about whatever they think technology is. It's your job to moderate what you pay attention to.
If i could wish one ability/skill, I would wish to have this person's articulation skill
:Chefs-kiss: