Some day, we'll have a technology sub that isn't polluted with Twitter "news".
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It's a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.
Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch platforms combust due to their own arrogance.
We'll save you a seat, but you'll need to bring your own popcorn.
Anyway I'm glad this shitshow happened because it was a much needed boost for federated software like Lemmy.
Turns out X is giving it to itself. Ironic.
Seems like someone couldn't wait for X to deliver. cause as the great poet once said "X gon' give it to ya, fuck waiting for you to get it on your own, X gon' deliver to ya", but alas
Never understood why we call them tech companies to be honest. There is nothing technologically interesting at twitter. And if there is... it is never the subject.
So I think the main thing is scale—they're tech companies (in the category they're in) because of the engineering required to build & maintain something that operates at the scale they do
And IMO at least in the early years it was pretty impressive what Twitter was capable of in terms of technology.
If I remember, tech companies are generally those whose primary products are digitally based. And technology these days has essentially become synonymous woth the internet.
Let's hope "X" continues down the path to it's own demise.
I'm still waiting for any article that talks about the tech that Twitter is supposed to be so famous for.
What Twitter did well I think was handle the non-trvial problems of scale, and did a fairly credible job of content moderation. I can find fault with a lot of how they handled that but they did honestly try. Becoming the dominant platform is always largely luck, but had they not adequately handled scale and content they would not have lasted for so long. Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Twitter like it or not has been pivotal for connecting people around the world especially those with less developed infrastructure. The Arab Spring events would not have happened without it. Which is why I think the Saudis were happy to give Elon money. They knew he'd either make it more friendly for them, or kill it and they'd have a hold on him because of the money he owes.
This is a bit of a learning experience though.
The big tech companies advocated during 2020 that they were not biased and should not be held responsible for policing the Internet.
Since then, FB swapped to Meta to cover up the documents showing FB is intentionally causing psychological damage our children because it gives them more clicks/view time.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
Twitter, a social media company known for free speech, was bought by Musk, a former Trump associate. Trump was reinstated during this period and dissent was banned.
Google decided to push web DRM to force us to use their software or else we can't access the Internet.
Sounds like they very much want to police the Internet. We just aren't putting the pieces together in a collective way.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
I'm not a huge OpenAI fan, but it's not yet been determined that they acted illegally. I believe the matter is still being pursued in court.
I think people are too focused on the scraping, which is clearly not illegal, but is what the roch people who own the websites are hollering about because they wanted to make money off of selling the posted content they did not actually own
Open AI's implementation of image creation in the style of a particular artist using copyrighted works is going to be the big outcome.
It's not illegal for a person to learn things online. That's one of the original purposes of the "world wide web" when it was opened to universities.
It is illegal to copy someone's brand and use it to make money. These chat bots are literally charging people to take input like "write a story in this author's style" and outputting a story that is a poor mimicry. The main problem is they are charging money based on someone else's trademark. Not that they write a similar story.
Immorally then.
Illegally, maybe. Immorally, probably not. It’s fine for a human to read something and learn from it, so why not an algorithm? All of the original content is diluted into statistics so much that the source material does not exist in the model. They didn’t hack any databases, they merely use information that’s already available for anyone to read on the internet.
Honestly, the real problem is not that OpenAI learned from publicly available material, but that something trained on public material is privately owned.
On Reddit I've found most of the news about the big social networks is posted by only handful accounts, they also don't post other interesting things, so you can just block them.
I'm hoping that'll work on Lemmy as well.
That's just true of social media in general. 1% of the accounts generate 99% of the content.
Does anyone know where the normal people are going though? I suspect Mastodon and Tildes but I could be corrected.
All this, Ryan said, explains why the trolls "are getting more extreme and desperate." The pool of people available to get attention from is shrinking, so the only way to keep the engagement rates as high is to say wilder and nastier things. But eventually, there will be so few people on Twitter left to aggravate that even white nationalist dogwhistling and Holocaust denialism won't work.
Mastodon would be my personal preference, but Bluesky seems pretty noisy to me, which seems like what people want from microblogging sites (I'm more of a reddit/lemmy/kbin style person, myself.) The question is whether Bluesky pulls a Google+ and stays invite-only for so long that they miss their own hype train.
So you tried it? I haven't known anyone that have tried it. A journalist said that the existing users are rude about newbies because they want it to themselves but I've seen a lot of bad reporting about Lemmy. Did you find it cranky about new users?
Keep in mind that I barely use it and only follow a few people I followed from TwiX.
People seemed friendly enough but there is a lot of self-serving navel gazing, and it seems like the "Discover" feed is full of inside jokes/references that I don't use the app enough to get.
My first day the big thing was complaining about how terrible and bigoted the devs of bluesky were, for something they said that I never did figure out, and the subsequent complaining about people complaining about the devs. Very dramatic.
To be fair, I'm sure if you just followed the people you cared about, and avoided the discover feed, it would be pretty Twitter-like.
Also, there's a character limit and you can't edit. These aren't technical limitations anymore, like they were for Twitter at the beginning, so they must be design decisions.
If I had an invite left I'd give you one.
I have tried all the things! And I recently saw that article you're referencing.
In my own experience, I haven't seen one single person being rude or mean or blowing off newcomers. I suspect the bar to entry is slightly higher because you have to get your head around how the fediverse works, so the types of people coming here trend more patient. It's also a slower pace here, which can be good or bad depending on what you like.
The nicest feature for my use is that you can follow just about anyone anywhere. On kbin especially. There you can follow users from any Lemmy instance, or an entire instance, as well as users at Mastodon. The downside is that it can be a little tricky at first to figure out how to follow someone who's on another instance. It's not hard, but it's something new if you're coming from a single entity site like Twitter.
It's also no big deal to make an account on multiple instances if you're not sure where to go. My approach with all of them was to browse the local server (e.g., lemmy.world, mastodon.social) rather than the federated feed. The local feed gives you an idea of who's on that instance, what topics come up a lot, how the users act, etc. I'd also check out the "about" section. That will show you who the moderators are and what their focus and approach is. Some are laissez-faire and others are much more curated, so there's something for everyone.
The neat thing about this system is that you can find more niche instances if you have a particular interest -- gaming, software development, climate, science, memes, etc. You can make that your main instance and still see everything going on across all instances. That helps eliminate a lot of FOMO.
I was never on Twitter and not on most social media except Reddit, which I thought I'd miss. But I've enjoyed using Mastodon, Firefish, and Lemmy/kbin a lot. It's a smaller group but still plenty to see and lots of interesting people and topics. Everyone has been very nice, but it's easy to mute or block people or subs that you're not interested in. After that you won't see them in your feed at all.
Looking at who's involved with blue sky, though, I can't help wondering how many times the users need to be taught the same lesson.
I have come over a few Reddit communities who moved to Discord of all things. I don't get why. That isn't even remotely the same type of discussion platform.
I'm really not a fan of Discord. Why would anyone use a platform that's not accessible without making an account and requires an invite to each group? If it wasn't branded towards gamers I don't think it would have much appeal.
Imo it's because sites like reddit make communities too open. It's common knowledge that once a sub regularly makes it to r/all, it loses all identity and joins the vague soup of r/all content which everyone upvotes with no regard for the source.
A lot of people don't want one big page with all the biggest communities thrown together. They just want to follow what they like and nothing else.
That said, the chat room format of discord is a pretty awkward stand-in for a forum type of community.
At least for me, Mastodon replaced Twitter and Lemmy replaced Reddit. But then, I'm not "normal" and find the Fediverse to be endlessly fascinating.
I thought it was the same thing that happens with these "content creator" in every niche. Over saturation requiring these greater extremes to get more attention.
Salon.com articles always sound like a 21 year old Redditor wrote them.
“The grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex are not okay.”
Who writes this lmao. Do they spin a wheel of buzzwords and just write a sentence with whatever comes up?
It made sense to me and I didn't even look twice. Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Jordon Peterson, etc. = the grifters that she talks about in the article, and the "troll-industrial complex" are their paid followers or their suckered in fan boys. It's been a thing since 2015 at least.
Amanda Marcotte is the author, a reasonably distinguished and well known figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte
Always remember to never feed the trolls. It's a very basic Internet rule that we should have continued to follow. Block and move on
i think in this case we also want to consider...
do not click a twitter link
... as the article states, it is the traffic, itself, that they want.
Even better. Don't click on Twitter and don't engage with trolls in any format.
Don't they want to reduce traffic since they can't pay their bills?
It's not just block and move on though, I can't find the article that explains a study of it. If the person is a simple troll, then yeah, do it that way. But if they're a nuanced, giving false info, and sound convincing troll, give one response and then stop engaging and downvote. That gives a person who doesn't understand that the troll is full of bs a counterpoint to at least not take it as fact. It's a counter to the "get there first" strategy of trolling.
The escalation may have nothing to do with the slow demise of Twitter. It may be the case that the liberals have gotten used to one level of trolling and ignore it. Trollers then have to become even more extreme to get their attention.
Twitter also recently started paying users who get more engagement like quote retweets, thus, people do would normally bash trolls via QRT are less likely to keep doing it