yip-bonk

Totally agree that huge social media systems need to be understood as disproportionately affecting misinformation. I don’t know anything about Telegram, though.

Are the pushback people fReEzE PeAChErs or something? Is Telegram just lovely? Dunno.

Okay but it’s the first thing people will think. So, you’ll likely always be defending it. Just 2¢.

Empathy.

The site has always been much smaller than Facebook, and it only mattered because politicians, journalists, and those who currently pass for public intellectuals were using it. Whether you read The New York Times or watched Fox News, you would encounter content that began its life on Twitter.

This article is a big long hot take. Which is fine, it’s kind of entertaining. But yeah if you care what the NYT and Fox News are printing on a daily basis you might feel a little untethered at the moment. Understanding that the two are linked is so close to understanding . . . something.

Yet Trump wouldn’t have been as destructive without it. Covid wouldn’t have been as destructive without it. It was dead to anyone who knew what it was yet here we are, hoping the millions stuck in Apartheid Clyde’s Magic Funhouse can escape.

In the early nineties the term “droolproof” was, well, if not popular then at least existant. “Droolproof” instructions would be something like “do not expose your laser printer to open fire or flame”.

Mastodon needs droolproof instructions. A private company like Twitter creates a series of gates for users to jump through and rigs things on the back end to make it so that people are unable to screw up too much. It’s like a Fisher-Price chainsaw versus the actual chainsaw of Mastodon.

It’s easy to forget how many people are active on social media who have never read a manual or a FAQ or who even know how to google very well, or at all. It’s a huge proportion. Twitter serves them all by being, well, what it is. People give up their privacy and data patterns in exchange for a corporation making the experience droolproof.

There needs to be a youtube of some photogenic person happily showing how to use it. Srs. If we want to kill Elmos Fascist Tea Party we need that.

Okay, I read the article. It isn’t “essentially” a no. It’s “let’s believe that google and apple wouldn’t let this data be misused.”

As well as several paragraphs about a three-person study (wtf), and an inconclusive one, for no apparent reason other than to underscore “we just don’t know”. Then they give paragraphs over to Apple and Google for them to repeat their claims that everything’s just fine-and that’s it. That’s the article.

So it’s “essentially no” if you believe google wouldn’t harvest your data or that intelligence agencies and hackers can’t or wouldn’t listen in.

TL;DR, go into the Privacy settings of your phone and disable everything that uses it - that’s the best you can do.

Holy Flurking Schnitt. So . . . no one understands exactly how it works or even how it works past the first couple of abstractions.

That explains so much.

The void appears to have calmed down for now, with the current state of the board suggesting a truce among users. That’s good news for those whose art was being obliterated by the movement, though whether Reddit will listen when the money is now rolling in is another matter.

What money is “rolling in”?

So jenius.

[w/r/t API kerfuffle] In some ways, this makes sense: third-party apps let users skip ads, which hits Reddit’s bottom line. The pricing, however, seems steep. Why?

Well, the answer is AI. Basically, former Reddit board member Sam Altman, who departed in 2022, admitted his company, OpenAI, had trained on Reddit data. I find it difficult to believe that Huffman didn’t know OpenAI was training using Reddit’s data, particularly since Altman sat on Huffman’s board. Suddenly, Huffman is saying the API is very valuable, especially to buzzy AI companies that investors have lately had the hots for. This seems to position Reddit as being in the shovels business during the AI gold rush.

One case in point was a very big dispute, in 2009, played out in the public forum about how Facebook was handling accounts and posts from Holocaust Deniers. Some employees and outside observers felt that Facebook had a duty to take a stand and ban those posts. Others believed that doing so was akin to censorship and sent the wrong message around free discourse.

Willner was in the latter camp, believing that “hate speech” was not the same as “direct harm” and should therefore not be moderated the same. “I do not believe that Holocaust Denial, as an idea on it’s [sic] own, inherently represents a threat to the safety of others,” he wrote at the time. (For a blast from the TechCrunch past, see the full post on this here.)

In retrospect, given how so much else has played out, it was a pretty short-sighted, naïve position.