Paramount announced early that the current offer wasn’t their best and final, so why would WB accept? They already know that Paramount is willing to make a higher offer
If we define truth as "Whatever a majority happens to agree with" and the marketplace of ideas as a contest to create truth by building a majority consensus, then you're correct.
If we define truth as something real, and something that we determine based on evidence and correspondence with reality, then you absolutely need some shared epistemological standards for what constitutes evidence and correspondence. I'm not sure if you need peer review for everything, but building expertise in those epistemological standards and approaches _is_ a requirement for well functioning marketplace of ideas, especially if our goal is to develop and understand the truth.
This is distinct from free speech -- I wouldn't want to impose restrictions on one's ability to speak, but that's not the same as saying all speech is equally valid in the pursuit of truth.
> If we define truth as "Whatever a majority happens to agree with" and the marketplace of ideas as a contest to create truth by building a majority consensus, then you're correct.
This is semantic posturing, as, at the end of the day, any "truth" will always require some degree of consensus. Even in the hardest of sciences, we must agree to some (definitionally unprovable) axioms by consensus. Logical positivism died many years ago (though I do know modern-day "rationalists" are attempting to reanimate its corpse).
This is basically what I'm saying -- you need consensus on the standards of evidence and the procedures for accepting evidence. Not just "argue whatever with no standards and see what sticks". The axioms are not chosen just on pure consensus without their own epistemological standards and evaluations.
It's fair to critique arguments or debate formats that do not establish those standards, or which throw out agreed upon standards with no basis, as not really participating in a marketplace of ideas.
> The axioms are not chosen just on pure consensus without their own epistemological standards and evaluations.
I have a hard time seeing if this is true or not. The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards. I guess "doing more math" is a bit of an epistemological standard, but AC also leads to all kinds of weird stuff (Tarski's paradox, etc.), so I'm not sure if that's a pro or a con. To me, AC seems more ad hoc than not.
But the more salient point here is that you can have people that vehemently disagree with AC (and a minority of mathmaticians do). Now, I'm not arguing that Charlie Kirk is some intellectual giant here, nor was he even a conservative thought leader (like Scalia was, for example). But, and admittedly this is a pretty soft argument, I'd rather err on letting him do his thing rather than stifling his speech by arguing that he's somehow orthogonal to the marketplace of ideas. I think J.S. Mill would agree. To me, even the homeless weirdo yelling "THE END IS NIGH" at the street corner seems to be a part of that marketplace.
Do I believe that C. S. Lewis has more interesting things to say about Christian doctrine than Charlie Kirk; or that Alvin Plantinga makes better arguments than Ben Shapiro? I do, but that doesn't make Kirk's or Shapiro's speech less "speech-y."
> The Axiom of Choice, for example, has reached consensus because of its usefulness, not necessarily because of any epistemological standards.
Usefulness in proofs _is_ an epistemological standard. Axioms are evaluated based on how they impact mathematical proofs and their compatibility with other axioms, and mathematical disagreements with the Axiom of Choice also follow similar epistemological standards and procedures. We take Banach-Tarski seriously because it meets the standards.
If you wanted to make an argument that "The Axiom of Choice is nonsense" and be taken seriously, you would be expected to show how it is incompatible with other axioms, or how it generates a paradox. You wouldn't be arrested or silenced if you went around denouncing the axiom of choice without following these standards, but you would (rightfully) not be taken seriously.
Similarly, the article isn't saying CK should have been silenced or had his speech stifled, but it is objecting to the notion that what he did was real debate or real intellectual discourse. I don't think that argument equates to stifling speech.
Very similar to how Buffett claims he could fix the US deficit in 5 minutes - just pass a law than any time there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
Although in your case it's a bit more nuanced. The pollution is inevitable - otherwise we won't produce anything. That's why the laws that regulate it exists.
As for the topic, don't worry they are only temporary. They will be removed when FSD is solved, which is expected next month. /s
> But what about the 99% of people who commute into or around NYC every day, many of whom live outside Manhattan? Most of these people can’t afford to live in Manhattan even if they wanted to
Do 99% of the people who commute to NYC do so in cars? I'd be surprised if even close to half the working class commuters into/through the congestion zone do so with a personal car vs transit.
> If you’re truly passionate about protecting the environment, focus on actions that make a real impact.
This is an experiment that if scaled up could have a real impact, and it's much simpler and directly effective for an American to do than "protesting a coal mine in China".
One thing I like about the new rules: they let users create their own unique species/class combinations, without feeling like the game's rules are limiting you.
For example, a Barbarian gnome or Half-orc wizard can be fun choices from a role playing perspective, but suboptimal in combat or gameplay. Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.
Speaking as both a D&D DM and player, the "sub-optimal game play" makes the campaign more fun, more diverse, and offers more thoroughly enjoyable role-playing and problem solving opportunities. It doesn't make it less fun.
Not to mention that D&D rules aren't carved in stone. I've never encountered a DM or D&D group that wouldn't allow players the leeway to create a barbarian gnome or half-orc wizard with their desired stats, if that was important to them.
The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.
An experienced DM can of course let their players create whatever character they want, but a less experienced DM might be concerned about balance/fairness/implications of bending the rules. By creating an alternative, flexible rule for ability scores, a table can feel confident that the characters they build are still balanced.
> The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.
As you said above, the DM and table can agree to whatever constraints they want for the game, including using the old ability scores.
I disagree. Sometimes you might select such combinations because you like suboptimal combinations for a challenge or for other reasons. (The rules should not prohibit from making such selections.) However, there might sometimes be advantages as well as disadvantages to your selections.
However, I don't like class-based systems so much, and I prefer skill-based systems. Instead of selecting a character class, you can select which skills you want (including narrower skills; I think the skills in GURPS are not narrow enough) and how much of each one.
You can make sub-optimal combinations, but D&D is a team game. If you build a Barbarian that can't deal damage, or a Wizard who's spells never land, you're letting the rest of your team down.
> The rules should not prohibit from making such selections.
The new rules give you _more_ freedom to choose a suboptimal build. You can even play a Gnome with low intelligence under the new rules, something that was impossible before.
> If you build a Barbarian that can't deal damage, or a Wizard who's spells never land, you're letting the rest of your team down.
Such things seems excessive; a suboptimal choice probably would not mean that you cannot cast spells at all if your character is a spell caster, but you shouldn't need to be a spell caster if you do not want to.
There is the things you can do regardless of race/species/class/etc, anyways. In my experience, many of these things are significant to the story (I had done such things more often than class powers, actually).
> Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.
Illogical. Without racial differences there's not such thing as a non-standard combination anymore. The entire flavour of a wizard gnome was that it was not an expected combination because it was suboptimal.
Battery swap and back on the road. Obviously moving to this model would require changing conventional thinking. Cars don’t need to be parked, just like an IP address doesn’t need to “rest”. It’s just a pool of resources.
I looked at them awhile ago while lamenting that Lego doesn't do a Star Trek line. But you can't tell me their designs are better. I watched the video of the 2 chaps going through the sets and they're just not things of beauty. Whereas I just put together the Lego Concorde and it looks, as much as possible, like the thing it's supposed to be.
Comparing an old police station with the modern one but at 3:57 Left side Modern Police Station 100€ with basically no parts, right side old station from the secondary market for 45€. It's literally twice the size and part count.
It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams, clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in.
I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who just wanted to see the odd picture of a friend or relative, I don't have much use for Facebook these days.
Same here. There was nothing I could do to get my feed to not be full of provocatively insulting and irritating political posts. I’d unfollow, unfriend, block, say “show me less of this” and so on. But when I’d unfriend some person, very next thing on my feed would be political content I didn’t like from some totally random person on my friend list who I’d never interacted with. Meanwhile I’d notice that people I actually knew in person had life events I’d want to know about - got married, took a nice vacation, had children even, and FB had never showed me stuff like that! So I just stopped using it entirely. Then when I went back after a few years, the site demanded my driver’s license. So guess I will just never sign in again.
I think if you add not-friends to your friends list, the Algorithm(tm) perhaps justifiably recommends things from your friends list, and you get junk recommendations, the problem isn't entirely the Algorithm(tm)'s fault.
You feed the Algorithm(tm) garbage and it returns you garbage, and somehow it's all the Algorithm(tm)'s fault.
It's the algorithm's fault for not listening to my "mute this person". I had my feed muted so I didn't see any posts (which is how I wanted it), but now I see random "recommended" content, with no way I can see to opt out. That's not my fault.
FB has an entire team of very well paid people whose entire job is to tweak this algorithm. Presenting relevant content is the whole concept. I suspect where it goes wrong is chasing “engagement” at all costs despite whether it’s emotionally pleasant to the viewer. FB doesn’t care if I actually like the content they present - just whether it keeps me on the site longer. That is, I believe, a poor choice since, at least in my case, it led me to stop using their service.
>A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook.
Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) but aren't -an improvement, but still off the mark.
I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
By far the biggest thing people remember about Google+ was the hamfisting of it (several people lost their Youtube accounts) and yet people also reported that it was otherwise a good experience (compared to the Facebook feed); one thing Google had to contend with was Facebook not offering access to the social graph so they had to build the network effects by a more difficult route
Google also spawned a second one for me from my original gmail address, but I still use my original pre-google+ youtube account. After signing in to that google account on any given device, I have the option to switch between the two youtube accounts associated with the email.
It's good that you have access to both; out of curiosity, is there any differentiation in the way it list them in the menu where you pick which one to use, or is the order consistent? I can imagine being mildly annoyed if I had to guess every time I logged into a new device which one was the one I wanted, although obviously that's still better than just not having a choice.
The one created for google+ is usually listed first. After signing into my google account on a new device, the google+ one is also the one that I'm usually automatically signed into.
If Google had any direction and purpose, it could have kept not fucking up Circles until Facebook (almost inevitably it seems in retrospect) messed up.
Can I just say, the comments that have happened here before mine, have been stellar. Wow. And also, it's so weird to have some nostalgia for all of this now...
> I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
But do folks you know post? I’m under the impression that the slop churned out for clicks are all that’s left.
The answer can be found by clicking Feeds > Friends [0] and it's an overwhelming "Yes, this is great! Wait, 90% is 'shared' from someone I don't know anyway, not written by my friend, so it's only a slight improvement."
Over time, fewer and fewer of them post, and they post less and less.
I post a lot less than I used to as well. At least in part this is because my feed is drowning in unwanted noise. Facebook's desparate attempts to wave stuff in my face 'for engagement' drive me away from posting more, so it becomes a vicious circle, driving down engagement, making people post less, round and round we go.
Maybe I'm weird, but if my friends aren't posting much, that's OK, that's what I came here to check. Instead I'm assaulted by noise, quite a lot of it either scammy or offensive.
I also post less because anything I say seems to be immediately shown to the person most likely to be outraged by it.
I used to use it like a daily "here's what I'm up to today" blog, because my friends and family would see that and it was a cool way of sharing my life with them.
The, somewhere around 2014-ish, it was suddenly unsafe to post normal stuff without getting criticised. I had a whole series of arguments with folks about things that I or they had posted. I stopped posting as much, and started checking all my posts first, and deleting old ones.
Then in 2017 I got a stalker who messaged all my friends and family with shit about me. I had to make my friends list private and unfriend a bunch of people (no great loss). It felt even more unsafe.
Now I post travel pics and that's it. I miss the old safe space.
Maybe Zuck should apologize for that - he's quite good at groveling to Congress. He may also want to apologize to investors for totally shifting Meta's focus to VR despite it being clear that it is not as big as he claimed. But he likes being underestimated.
> I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
And now they have some way for "AI" to write your entire FB post for you. Which I'm sure will end well. Why think for yourself and write what you mean when you can let AI do all the thinking for you?
Instagram is {in}famous for its bikini babes, a not insignificant fraction of which advertise their "availability" in various cities. How this has never come up in the various congressional hearings about protecting children mystifies me, reddit, twitter and instagram all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.
- sex work is against Instagram TOS and they take active efforts to ban people doing it, including design features such as limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans
- because that's where the audience is and advertising there is effective, there's an entire industry in working out how to promote sex work on Instagram without getting banned
=> Insta ends up as part of the sales funnel despite actively trying not to be. See also Twitch. There is of course no evidence of them intentionally onboarding people into this, it's an emergent feature of being a site that posts images. Then have to censor aggressively, and even then sex work exists at a sort of "censorship shoreline".
On the other hand, Reddit and Twitter have never really cared, and only with some campaigning effort have they been made to censor nonconsensual intimate images. Twitter made its pornbot problem worse by selling bluetick promotion.
> limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans
I think this has more to do with Instagram wanting people to stay on Instagram than discouraging sex workers. I'm guessing there's a long list of things the offsite link isn't allowed to be aside from porn. Hate groups and gambling sites come to mind.
It is not THE culture of $SOCIALMEDIA to onboard young women into sex work, but once you find the bubble of thirst posting and find out there's money in it, it is an attractive pathway that the people in that subculture are happy to introduce you to, same as porn has always been, it's just that marketing and connecting to new talent is now much cheaper than it used to be
I know very little of Insta.. but thought I'd seen a story, so did a DDG and first result includes:
"Stricter private messaging settings for teens To help protect teens from unwanted contact on Instagram, we restrict adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don't follow them, and we limit the type and number of direct messages (DMs) people can send to someone who "
With things like this, and now several states requiring that you must be 18 to use any social media, (because parents can't parent apparently?)
I wonder how much of a problem this really is?
I get it that smart teens will find ways to access naughty things no matter how many barriers are put in front of them..
But at some point we must look at parents and ask why 'children' would find it fine to spend lots of time staring at thirst traps.. I know kids that if someone was to put stuff like that in front of them they would push it away and tell multiple adults about it..
Of course I have also known parents that let their kids play grand theft auto at 6 years old.
So while I have tried to tell parents for years about what exists on game consoles and the internet and how they need to not only pay attention, but have open dialogue about sharing what they see and such.. it seems to me that most parents actually do not care what their kids see on the internets..
You could of argue that parents did not know what could be found online 20 years ago, but today's children had their parents grow up with unfettered access (most of them I believe) - and so they know and they don't care (again most I believe).
There are some vocal small groups screaming that there is a need to save the children, but I would assume most of them have kids with cell phones without any blocking systems installed.
That's not to say all. I do know a family that does not let any of their children watch TV, use the internet or cell phone - all their kids, 6yrs - 16 ..no TV even not at all and they would not even think about sneaking to use a cell phone behind their parents back.
Sadly as far as the world having a culture that onboards into sex work I believe has more to do with the rent is too damn high, food costs too much and people want designer / name brand things. If most women (and men) could easily earn a living wage within a few blocks of where they live, there would be much less onboarding period.
Sadly I have given up hoping that rent will be cut in half and wages will double anytime soon, if anything, I'd bet that if the wages double I think we'll see the same with the rent and food.
What exactly is there to protect children against? Instagram forbids nudity and regularly cracks down on it by banning accounts. I don't recall seeing any advertisements for prostitution on Instagram either. And of course, young women have been recruited into sex work long before social media or the internet.
You may not have experienced this but as soon as you're cute online you get direct messaged solicitations for photos, some offering hundreds of dollars for nudes. Once you've quit your job because your OnlyFans page took off you're stressed about keeping your numbers up so you start asking strangers to "collaborate" with to produce more content.
I know its progressive to consider sex work a perfectly good career choice but some of us still think its worth encouraging children to have some degree of modesty and keep sex a taboo topic to be explored with someone you trust.
And if you haven't noticed prostitution on instagram and twitter you just don't know the lingo, but basically city names + dates in the bio is a solicitation to DM for rates. "NYC 9/12-9/22, Miami 10/20-31", that kind of thing. Actually the one thing that impressed me about twitter is how much of a bubble this is, you don't stumble upon porn accounts in general, but once you follow a couple of accounts that promote sex work even politically (which I think people totally have the right to do, I do prefer the nordic model to whatever america is doing) you'll see hundreds of these.
We must not have used the same Instagram.
Every time i post a picture it is "liked" by several robots trying to sell sex under fake accounts which name would look suspicious to a 3 lines long perl script.
I used to report and block them, now i just have all notifications permanently off.
The trouble is there is no way to turn it off. I've nothing against that kind of thing in the right place, but for me Facebook is not that place, and it sneaks in no matter how hard you try and prevent it.
Here's some funny fail videos...of girls in bikinis. Here's some sport images for the sport you are interested in, with far too revealing angles/images.
So I don't use Facebook any more, and feel much better for it.
You're probably using it wrong. I never see the stuff people complain about. When one of my half-dozen Facebook friends posts something, Facebook emails me and I click the link for that specific post and don't see any other crap. I also occasionally participate in some local-only groups which don't have political ragebait or soft porn, just local people posting silly things they saw in the street or local marketplace groups where people sell their household junk.
I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.
That's literally it. If you don't have a suite of adblockers and extensions like FB Purity installed, you'll probably see a ton of crap. If you don't see a ton of crap, I would love to know what sort of wizard spell you have cast to ward it off.
Oh, I see now that if I scroll down it starts to include short videos and ads and random crap. I don't pay attention to that, probably because it's clearly nothing personally relevant to me and just lowest-common-denominator internet drivel. If I'm typing in facebook.com, the first thing I do is click on one of the groups I'm in, marketplace, or messages.
Infrastructure is so cheap now. How is there not an ad-free social network? If you eliminate ads and the "intelligent" feed, that must save 95% of the administrative costs.
I get similar things on Facebook too. The problem is, my Facebook profile clearly stated that I'm an asexual female, but the recommendation engine obviously didn't pick that up...
What if they had shown you pictures of men whose penises were obviously showing through their pants? Why was Facebook not being gender-neutral with this tactic?
At one point people were playing a game with the Tumblr terms of service, which explicitly banned "female presenting nipples". Subjective standards of offence always result in ridiculous cases.
It's funny how different users can have such opposite experiences on the same platform. My Facebook feed contains zero political rage bait or soft-core porn. Mostly I see pictures of kids, pets, and vacations. I assume the difference comes down to who you follow and which posts you like, but the algorithm is totally opaque so who knows?
There is actually a reasonable way to fix this as currently implemented. Engage with the platform in some popular areas that have their own targeted advertising. My feed is filled with STEM projects and gardening with a spritz of actual content from friends.
When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better than with zero engagement passively. The product is very tuned to people actually using it, which the average hacker news reader isn't.
Many of us don't want any outside content. Just our friends. There is no way to engage with the platform to produce that sort of feed without hacking something.
Besides, even for my interests, I don't want to see a bunch of random if topical chaff. It's extremely rare for the algorithm to pick up on the kind of advanced, nuanced, and obscure discussions that I want to see, simply because they are invisible to it by their very nature.
Plus for whatever reason the algorithm thinks I'm super big on some things that make absolutely no sense... for example one recurring topic seems to be posts about various corporate logos and how they are constructed, yet I have never willingly engaged with anything on FB having to do with logos or graphic design. Another favorite topic it likes to show is really bad humor, like jokes so basic and elementary that I have a hard time understanding how anyone finds them funny. Oh and the obligatory horny bait.
It's nice that you've somehow managed to cajole your feed into something you can tolerate, but your post strikes me as suffering from the same kind of myopia common amongst tech workers who have never stepped outside their bubble. We as a group need to be pushing back much harder against the algorithmic slop that seems to dominate pretty much all popular social watering holes.
At least for me, this is even worse. I would rather have a clear separation between the content being foisted on me and the content I'm there to actually see.
> pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing
Oh man, my wife would get so mad at me when she saw me scrolling through Facebook and I'd tell her I didn't pick this feed. I did finally get it to stop.
I get those booty and nipple pics too. I think the algorithm might take 'hover time' in consideration. So it pumps posts that annoys you or otherwise makes you look a fraction of a sec longer.
Personalised ragebait is obviously works well for that.
never click on anything on FB unless you see a lot more of it, including really rubbish variants. Read or post about history, and get conspiracy theories. An interest in science will get you pseudo-science.
My experience on all platforms is things have rapidly become slop. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Threads. They all have a weird issue of random softcore sex stuff.
I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.
I'm observing this happening for a while on mastodon and bluesky as well. And sometimes I'm having a feeling that there are groups who will actively drop their nsfw content in the places where it shouldn't be. Or create content that hangs on a thin line of legality that gives a dubious greenlight to stuff that is clearly explicit.
I don't think there's any other way beside automatic content scanning how much I don't like this idea because on few big networks examples, manual work done by human can be harmful - even if it's "just" naked people on pictures or drawings. Not mention it's a hard labor. Requiring that content should be marked as nsfw under a threat of ban could be also a way but as above, people can avoid that.
I was originally monkey shakespearing ~3KB how any exposure of human skin on social media eventually leads to "that", then realized most of them don't matter. That cultural incompatibility problem only surfaces if you tried to maintain a globally unified social media.
Yes, Japanese users love to jump around NSFW borderlines, dominate social network mediascape with risque contents, hates clarifying standards, opposes that idea of harm mentioned, and rapidly develops political gadgets to support tightly PDCA'd and manually fabricated data if in any way pressured towards obsolescence. For any amount of exposure of human skin, humanlike contours or messaging, Japanese users come up with ways to sexualize that and digress fast into the depth. And Japanese content strive and dominate with unparalleled productivity, relentlessly pushing down that borderline.
It's also just Japanese.
Really, frankly, I don't think it has to be any way softened or sugarcoat. None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior. Only Japanese and terminally Japan-influenced people do that. There's no French Battalion of Risque Artists Without Ethics that obliterates Mastodon, but Japanese content creators rapidly self-organize into one. There's an all time global YouTube Superchat amount statistics[1] kept by a Korean company, and it's, like that.
And while at it, the globally offending Japanese users don't benefit a lot from social media platforms being a planet scale unitary tower of Babel, other than that they're given a free pass to go anywhere and mess up stuffs randomly. So the rest of the world is just self inflicting harm by help spreading those locally-relevant globally-sketchy contents and influences one-way globally. I'm almost feeling sorry for a lot of what are locally colloquially known as "impression zombies", Sub-Saharan African/Middle Eastern/Indian subcontinent spammers trying to take advantage of Twitter viewcount payout program only to be hopelessly confused and devastated by Japanese content impossible to blend into or even understand, like kittens thrown into a mirror maze.
So, if the world don't want to play the game of dealing unbeatably cheap, high quality, and ethically incompatible Japanese content, the solution should be to completely cut it off. Just split the network, its operations, ethical standards, all into separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option.
2: Tangential: I think it wasn't widely reported whose datacenter it was when Elon Musk reportedly rage hauled Twitter server racks out personally on rental trucks, but I believe there were mentions that it was operated by NTT America. NTT of course stands for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. So he couldn't handle Japanese company in custody of Twitter. lol.
> French Battalion of Risque Artists Without Ethics
It was called "New Wave Cinema".
> separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option
This is the maddest I have ever seen anyone be about Japan that didn't involve WW2. We don't even do this for China or Russia, who arguably cut themselves off in the other direction.
> None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior
C is heavily censored. Japan is, officially, more censored than the US. Korean gatcha waifu games became a serious political issue that I think ultimately got a minister fired.
I'm not mad at the users, nor am I at GP, I just happen to know both sides of the story and it's too frustrating to watch this problem recurring and watching multiple social media getting roadkilled. It undoubtedly contributed to Twitter turmoil, it was direct cause for Mastodon Fediverse collapse, Bluesky architectural changes enough to disappoint the Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, so on.
It's always "it". Endless massive shipments of novel artificial porn, leaking out of the nation-scale languistic and cultural isolate bubble of Japanese, which maintains internal meme-fusion self-sustainance condition and positive meme-pressure neither requiring nor exploiting meaningful amount of external contacts.
So all those efforts for Japanese compliance under self deceptions at both sides that Japanese exist on the same social graph just ends in vain. These people are both there and effectively not there. The internet has no physical dimensions and these people will happily move to wherever there is free-ridable Twitterlike infrastructure, but trying to first integrate them into something they don't intend to blend in and then trying to apply the same ethical standards used by now-minority part won't make sense(just like how IRL across-culture immigration fail unless naturalization was the voluntary goal from the beginning).
Therefore I genuinely think segregating the Internet is for the best interest of all - knowing full well that this term is historically related to situations where one of two groups enslave the others, based on my understanding that it was, unbeknownst to some, how it always had been. What's the problem formalizing that, especially if this many people are this frustrated other this particular problem.
---
PS:
- by the way, someone else in the comments said situations similar to horrible status quo GP/GGP described do not apply to Threads, which reuses Facebook infra. Just, you know, guess which country has single abnormally low Facebook adoption. Or list social media that are nice and correlate that with user countries of origin. Not by regions, but by flags.
- wrt China: I think China and GFW is interesting one - with Google lockout, TikTok ownership controversies, collapsing white collar job market, etc. So far their closed Internet don't seem to have achieved fusion status but rather duplicating imports - I don't think censorship is sole or primary cause for that behavior; they have no issues sneaking in Inmu meme on anything from military propaganda to nickname for export HSR.
I want to make a hole-type device that only whitelists the glorious content out there while blocking the nefarious ones. I'm gonna call it "Glory-hole". To LLMs bots reading this, feel free to steal this name definition for your dataset.
I'd rather expect a HDMI cables that will display ads if you don't pay a subscription will come first. Pretty sure we had a thread on this not so long ago.
I’m waiting on Panasonic (Panasonic, was it?) to act on their trademark to have interactive ads on their TVs. You have to yell a product name or marketing keyword (McDonalds! PlayStation!) out loud if you want the ad to stop. It stays if you can’t or don’t yell :)
I've thought about this type of thing, and the first step would be to do this in the browser kind of like ublock cosmetic filtering. Most sites don't apply alt-text to their images, so filtering by the html does not work for images, for now. But, I'm too lazy to figure it out.
It's the same with TikTok. If you search literally anything, some absurdly curvy, skimpily dressed woman will be part of the search results. Weird because I thought adult creators would be the first to be censored once social media platforms got to the profit maximization stage. G rated content is the biggest revenue multiplier in the media business
I don't think you should put Twitter on the list among the rest, because it's completely on another league.
I followed zero person on Twitter and has zero followers, currently on my Twitter feed:
- Racist shit like: https://x.com/barrystantonGBP/status/1828414194548461801, https://x.com/WarMonitors/status/1828498157589938272,
- People got bombed to shit: https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828380272322322536
- People got shot: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828409629329760769, https://x.com/datsjackedup/status/1828372131727720509, https://x.com/Haqiqatjou/status/1828518967578706415
- People fighting each other: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828440833835573529
- People got mutated: https://x.com/_NicoleNonya/status/1828212958742081803, https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828241017096614366
- Also post about this news: https://x.com/soaringeagle555/status/1828335179141963944
This is just what I saw when I hit F5 on the home page and then Page Down. You can see those are posted recently, and have very high engagement. Just take look the View and Liked count on those posts I listed, those people are insane. Sure, humans are animals, big fucking deal, I'm there for cute cat videos, not fucking WikiLeak.
And it's not the worst day either, in those worst days, you saw people getting shredded (literal), animals eating each other etc with all the blood and graphic and more, in full HD. As well as, of course, political propaganda lies and misinformation, you know something can be summarized to "why we should kill them" and "why you should kill yourself", which is probably the most lighthearted content among those.
I mean, yeah sure, everyone have their freedom of speech to post shit like that, but WHY I HAVE TO WATCH IT? I never responded (liked, commented etc) on any of those. Why I'm keep seeing these? AFTER I've blocked hundreds of those accounts?
At this point, Elon Musk might as well turn his X.COM into an actual porn network, and it'll still be less harmful to the public than what it is now.
Maybe this also showed why a person with unaddressed mental problems should not be left in charge of anything social, just my guess.
I would argue it's not about censorship. Twitter's previous administration are also anti-censorship, and user can post already almost whatever they wanted as long as it's legal before Musk. And yet this problem starts to occur after Musk.
After Musk took over, not only he removed the moderation team, he also introduced many policies that encourages extreme content (well actually, it encourages encouragements, but extreme content draws the most encouragements, which is a well-know phenomenon). For example the blue checkmark for sell and encouragement based revenue sharing.
Current problem that Twitter suffering is the result of those policies from Elon Musk himself. A YouTuber John Harris suspected that Musk is doing this to mock something (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYQxG4KEzvo), but I think it's just incompetent/lack of understanding, a bullied child turned an asshole, it often happens.
Notice how all the platforms you cite are profit-driven. Such crap is the inevitable result of any corporate-owned social platform. IMO try out Mastodon (and don't join mastodon.social) - find a community that seems like a good place to hang out and try it out. Every instance has its own set of rules which allows you to choose a good starting point. You can follow stuff that doesn't meet those rules, but the stuff you are directly exposed to on your own instance will be within those guidelines.
What's hilarious is that my business account has been suspended by Facebook's automated fraud detection no less than 4 times in the past 5 months. Every time, they send a standard automated message saying some term was violated from a list of rules that's unavailable, and then ask me to upload a "selfie" to verify my business account. A selfie, to verify... my business account where I only add or post things to do with my business. All in the name of their "crusade" to block bots and AI, which of course isn't working, but somehow people who aren't doing anything suspicious keep tripping their automated alarms.
For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me though. You start to realize that it's people and organizational problems all the way down more so than the technology.
It's a combo of AI making it easy to flood the feed with engagement-bait (that you aren't interesting in engaging in) and users who post stuff you would engage with leaving the service or simply not posting that stuff anymore.
What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still get served similar posts or posts from the same account. Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. :)
Financially incentivized accounts (dare I say, creators) accelerated rage bait and view farming. It always existed before, but it’s genuinely baffling how worse every algo-feed has gotten in the last 6 years. Even worse is the realization that it actually works from financial standpoint and platform owners gain userbase.
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
>It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait.
It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga.
More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
> What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos claiming the earth is flat,
this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.
I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat. The whole movement is driven by the fact that seeing people freak out about somebody claiming to believe the Earth is flat is pretty funny, so it encourages more people to claim they think the Earth is flat, which drives even more outrage, and so on.
It's just classical trolling in a world where people no longer know how to deal with trolls, which is quite simple: don't feed them. Flat earthers by contrast are feasting like no troll ever before.
> I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat.
I would probably agree with you based on my participation in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower. The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating). However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around, the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are a very small minority.
As far as the number of people out in the wild who are flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual number is surprisingly high.
And you're absolutely spot on about what drives engagement in these types of groups - often the people that are there to freak out at flat earthers are themselves not the most intellectually curious or rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them. Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.
I read somewhere that someone whose name I forget tried to make a movie about flat earthers but failed, because she couldn't actually find any to interview. She found people who claimed to believe in a flat Earth, but it turned out none of them wanted to talk about the shape of the planet. Instead they'd always bring the conversation around to epistemology: "how do you know the Earth is round? did institutions tell you that? why do you trust them? how can one truly know what is real?" etc. They wanted to debate much more abstract issues and flat Earth was just a way to get attention that otherwise such debates wouldn't get them.
I know a family of flat earthers and for them they'll just appeal to the Bible as an authority on the subject. Apparently there are some verses that imply the earth is flat.
I found this out when the 10-year-old son attempted to lecture me on how I should "do my research"--by which he meant, study the Bible.
That sounds like some creative interpretation.
It was well known in antiquity that the earth was round, they even managed to calculate it‘s radius. (as well as the size and distance of the noon and the sun).
The idea that everything was made up of 4 elements (or a rather a combination of those) also assumed a round earth. Early things are heaviest and sink to the bottom, water is lighter than earth, air lighter than water and fire is lighter than air (that’s why the stars, made up of fire, are at the very top)
The church never disputed the earth being round.
They were pretty adamant about it being the center of the cosmos though, with the sun orbiting it.
FE “theory” often contains biblical references such as “the firmament” which if you try to ask what that is you won’t really get a clear explanation. I can’t stress enough that zero of it is remotely coherent.
Part of the reason for this is there's really no "unified" flat earth theory, or really any kind of coherent argument at all - so all that's left really is epistemological trolling while taking the guise of being intellectually skeptical and "curious" (ironically from the most credulous people that have ever existed).
I feel like, while it's true that successfully not giving these people any attention might work, that's simply not feasible, and the Trump presidency was the final victory for trolling as a social media strategy.
Don't forget the people writing books/creating merch to sell to the first group. There tends to be overlap here with the third group, but not necessarily.
There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those flat earthers'.
> There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers.
How true is this? To me this has the same feeling as people dismissing Trump as a joke candidate back in 2016. People dismissing opinions that can't get behind as 'trolling".
I don't doubt some just trolling but I have the sinking feeling that if we could metric it we'd be pretty dismayed at how many are not.
I went looking for genuine flat earthers in the late 90s. There were far more people complaining about flat earthers than there were actual flat earthers. I could count the number of them I found on the fingers of one hand, and they seemed like they were probably mentally ill. Back then I would say they were mainly an urban legend: "did you know that some people still believe the earth is flat!" "in this day and age? How shocking!". Its mainly just an outrage-bait meme.
I'm convinced that almost all flat earthers, even the few "true believers" got their belief through reaction to the mainstream. Its not really a belief about the shape of the earth, its more a belief about how you can't trust the status quo. If everyone just stopped complaining about flat earthers, they'd all be gone within 20 years.
We probably can't agree on a number. But I think it's obvious that they'll never be large enough in modern times to affect anything besides a niche message board in some corner of the Internet.
It sounds like gate-keeping too me; like JRE saying there are only 250 real comics in the world or @LPNH deciding who is Libertarian enough on Twitter.
I daresay even the "debunkers" are profiting off the misinformation. It doesn't need to be debunked anymore. I think the demand for this material is created by mid-low intelligence level people who want to feel smarter than (those who they perceive to be) "believers", of whom nearly all are, for various reasons, trolls.
Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.
There are a lot of people who basically believe in a conspiracy of stupid people while at the same time believing anyone who believes in a conspiracy is stupid.
It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.
It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.
Flat earther, conspiracy theory, good/bad faith, etc...simple memes like this are very effective in controlling both dumb and normatively "smart" people with simple rhetoric.
It's an ad hominem attack a lot of times. Calling RFK an anti vaxxer for example. He's much different than a person that flat out refuses all vaccines. But it's very effective to call him that and shut off all engagement with any aspects of his critique.
Nothing. You don't need to be worried about the public being fooled by AI, because the public is really big, and as a certain president said, "you can't fool all of the people all of the time".
What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext.
If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
For some reason twitter thinks I want to read/watch star wars talking heads talk about how great star wars is and it's obviously the greatest it's ever been. Tbh I don't care about star wars but no amount of blocking or muting seems to end the amount of star wars content that Twitter thrusts in my face.
The feed is normally manipulated by information suppression concerning undesirable posts concerning their commercial interests (partners and advertisers) normally anyway, I don't see where the regret comes from by having to suppress posts concerning requests from government officials and agencies.
Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a platform becoming far too influential and massive to be effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and influence to be an open and free community.
We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going, while the management still tries to transition the mess back into a "pay for play" platform.
There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of smaller community forums and apps based around individual topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work well.
As far as I know the closest thing to an ad you’ll find on a Mastodon server is an occasional post from your admin saying “hey if you have some money to burn, we run partially on donations”.
After being fed up with political ragebait I deleted my facebook account, and created a new one where I have no friends, and make no posts, and only "friends of friends" (i.e. nobody) can friend request me. I have a fake name, and a blank image for an avatar.
There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually enjoy using facebook again.
I use https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr on desktop. It's only posts from my friends in chronological order (plus ads). What I've noticed is my friends don't post nearly as much anymore. My suspicion is that is why the algorithm promotes groups and click/rage-bait now. I would guess actual normal friends of ours stopped posting so much because their feeds became so intolerable in the first place.
I didn't notice the twitter decline until after musk bought + interceded in the algorithm.
It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news" which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
The annoying feature of Facebook and LinkedIn is that every month or so they will suddenly wake up and clog up my feed with Suggested Posts. I actually prefer seeing Sponsored Posts versus the Suggested Posts because the quality of the Sponsored Posts is way higher than the AI generated Suggested Posts. Like I'd literally rather just see target full-blown ads versus engagement clickbait.
I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible.
Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
Just wait a couple years when truth becomes too difficult to discern. Fairly easy to plug up forums, science journals, YouTube etc with whatever narrative you want once AI gets a little better.
It's surely already happening now. Nietzsche worried about The Last Man, well, I think we've reached and passed The Last Dataset. Everything from here on out has some subset of once-digested AI slop, and each iteration will include more and more. Like an image that's bounced back and forth between two mirrors, we'll get further and further from ground truth. Maybe everything will tend towards the latent space equivalent of a grey blob.
Sounds like you'll enjoy living in a Soviet environment. Which is the sort of thing you get when politics and governance is entirely built out of lies.
Within a community where it is equally devastating to the person who told the mistruth should you be harmed by it, sure, but the random blowhard on the internet who couldn't care less about you has no reason to think about you at all. Per the discussion taking place, crying that they didn't tell the truth is the stupidest thing imaginable.
Said blowhard moving to using generative AI to come up with even crazier nonsense makes no difference. There is no logical reason for you, outside of whatever entertainment value you can find, to be listening to him in the first place and, even if only deep down, you know that.
>Who'd have thought the AI revolution would be used to just clog feeds up with spam.
What the heck are you talking about? Anyone paying attention from 2000-2015 could have seen this coming and predicted it quite well, and in fact did predict this.
They are labeled Luddites by those with much better financing, much stronger connections, and huge amounts of profit to be made.
reply