Bingo.
It's been that way since its inception, astronauts with gun meme or whatever.
sp3tr4l
joined 7 months ago
Steam discussion forums ... kind of famously do not have or require any active, human moderation.
Basically, there's a simple 'foul word detector', and that's about it.
You could nuke everything that is not a manually pinned thread, and nothing of value would be lost.
I just tried out Gemini.
I asked it several questions in the form of 'are there any things of category x which also are in category y?' type questions.
It would often confidently reply 'No, here's a summary of things that meet all your conditions to fall into category x, but sadly none also fall into category y'.
Then I would reply, 'wait, you don't know about thing gamma, which does fall into both x and y?'
To which it would reply 'Wow, you're right! It turns out gamma does fall into x and y' and then give a bit of a description of how/why that is the case.
After that, I would say '... so you... lied to me. ok. well anyway, please further describe thing gamma that you previously said you did not know about, but now say that you do know about.'
And that is where it gets ... fun?
It always starts with an apology template.
Then, if its some kind of topic that has almost certainly been manually dissuaded from talking about, it then lies again and says 'actually, I do not know about thing gamma, even though I just told you I did'.
If it is not a topic that it has been manually dissuaded from talking about, it does the apology template and then also further summarizes thing gamma.
...
I asked it 'do you write code?' and it gave a moderately lengthy explanation of how it is comprised of code, but does not write its own code.
Cool, not really what I asked. Then command 'write an implementation of bogo sort in python 3.'
... and then it does that.
...
Awesome. Hooray. Billions and billions of dollars for a shitty way to reform web search results into a coversational form, which is very often confidently wrong and misleading.
Decent marks, assuming this is from 50+ meters out...
... and she's training to be a member of the Men in Black.
It sounds like they have not formalized the specifics, but 'sell off' and 'divest' could mean something like breaking up Bell into a bunch of smaller companies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Basically, it could look something like Chrome being mandatorily spun off as its own company, not under the Alphabet umbrella, no longer legally able to be internally funded by the rest of Alphabet.
Would this create a largely non viable standalone company?
Probably!
That's kind of the point.
Giant Ass monopoly?
Blow it up, reset the market structure back toward a state that's at least a bit closer to the mythical perfectly competetive free market, make some degree of actual competition exist to make the market actually responsive to consumer demands/preferences, lower the barrier entry for competitors, make innovation more likely.
Hey, anybody remember 12ish years ago when Alex Jones' worst fear was that Obama was going to use executive power to order the military to be deployed on American soil, violating Posse Comitatus, to massively round up and inter a bunch of Americans in FEMA reducation / death camps?
Anyone?
No one?
Whoo boy, growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household where I was the only one to go to college and everyone else became a Q Anon zombie sure was fuuuunnnnn!
ways to run a business or online service or productive enterprise that are not 'be a **shareholder profit driven advertisment company', **
My whole point here, this whole hill that I have been dying on, is that mass advertisement targeted at people with algorithmic precision is the problem, because its a worst case scenario combination of pushing regressive / fascist propoganda whilst also enriching megacorporations.
But your take away was apparently that I was saying something like 'companies should just provide services/products for free and then just go bankrupt' ... ???
Nebula seems to have figured this out.
Same with Peer Tube.
Plenty of ways to run a business or online service or productive enterprise that are not 'be a shareholder profit driven advertisment company', just takes a bit of ... economic imagination.
Well we can't get money out of politics because all the money will vote against getting money out of politics.
So any plan to do this will have to involve radical action outside of the norms of polite society which may or may not be against the rules of this community to describe in greater detail and specificity.
That's probably more along the lines of CPTSD or Impostor Syndrome.
Behaviors like this can absolutely occur with other disorders, or combinations of disorders, and if something like this only happens occasionally, with sensible, proximal causes, then this probably is not even any disorder, just a fairly normal reaction to something extremely stressful.
But when its a repeated, common occurance, and occurs with intensity vastly out of proportion to the signifigance of a proximal trigger, or just without one... yeah this is its own disorder.
Its in the DSM, I literally copy pasted this blurb from the Mayo Clinic's page on it.
You know, I think you are right.
I meant to say when the discussion forums were integrated and basically autogenerated for any game, when Steam went from 'this is our game launcher' to 'soon we will sell every pc game that has ever and will ever exist.'
But when it comes to hiring people to moderate things?
Insanity.
Facebook does this by hiring tens, hundreds of thousands of moderators in economically undeveloped nations, managed by a few thousand based in the US or EU.
Its a horror show sweatshop of constant exposure to the most horrible content imaginable, which basically drives many employees to suicide or insanity.
There is no AI that can do this.
... Valve could maybe? probably? afford to hire hundreds of thousands of low cost moderators following Facebook's model.
But I'm pretty sure that they would basically go, oh, we are now legally responsible for what is said on our platform?
Fuck it, nuke 99% of it from orbit, do a bit of redesign, hire a much smaller cadre of moderators, who will manage a vastly stripped down and more cumbersome and more restrictive ability to comment on or discuss things.
... What would be the downside to that?
12 year olds and morons with no impulse control now use discord instead of the steam forums?
People maybe go back to making their own game based community websites/forums?
... Who is going to stop using Steam because the discussion forums dissapear?
Because all the default comment posting and viewing settings for all the other ways you can leave a public message now flip to being restrictive and time delayed?
I really do stand by my other statement in this thread: You could erase everything that is not from a human, manually pinned discussion thread and nothing of value would be lost.