cakeistheanswer

It’s a very interesting thought, but it will always struggle to account for variables you can’t see.

It’s always going to be designed top down to approximate your own development as human from the ground up. I don’t douby AI as a feasible possibility, but I don’t think we’re headed for digital clones. They’re always going to have some amount of the creators ghost or assumptions in the machine.

Well this is the most dystopian thing I’ve seen today. The RFK article alone is a single right leaning source quoted twice and does 0 analysis on any claim.

If you fundamentally believe quoting NBC and the NY post is useful as ‘both sides’, I think you’re a shame to your name, or beyond sheltered.

I’m not even endorsing it, but if you want at least a veneer of lefty opinions start with Jacobin, they’re the ideological opposite of Fox news if there is one. And even on the worst day the content is better sourced.

Quoting fox news and NPR is useful if you have something to add, or analyze, not scrape and then provide no direct quotes.

You want an actually useful AI project? Take every direct word from public speeches and fact check it from public/govt DBs.

Drops in a bucket.

The sad reality is your average tax cheat will fight tooth and nail for every penny. Because even if right up to 99.9% is clawed bank, it’s all profit. Somehow it’s still hard to sell the right on having refs powerful enough to police the game.

Edit: stray word

I’ve checked the frontpage from time to time just to monitor what’s changing, but I have yet to log in.

I mean I didn’t graduate with a lit degree and spent my career in IT so I guess you can take a cross disciplinary endorsement. I was just a nerd.

His writing and timing are impeccable if you see it live, which is kind of lost on the page.

I found the histories worth reading because he’s editorializing history in his time. You have to remember his audience was us plebs, so we get the gossip instead of the record. You know too many times in history the hot gossip got covered by… literally Shakespeare?

The fact that he’s to the English language what the Beatles are to rock music feels eternally relevant too.

It’s a distilled version of ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There’s generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.

However, what’s always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.

It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.

When the barrier to entry is technical in nature you get a selection of the competent in that space as your representation. It’s not perfect, but it beats zuck, musk and Huffman.

I think some of that devolution going to be inevitable or you’re going to face charges of censorship from some corners, which is just it’s own cycle of rage. The network gets bigger, people click what they click and the aggregate of what our animal brains react to has a lot to be angry about.

What I worry most about is the acceleration of that cycle because we gradually gravitate towards instances with our preferred moderation or slant, which I can already see happening anyway.

I guess, at best, that It might be a cure with some side effects because it’s necessarily going to play with in/out crowd dynamics.

If this is at an instance level… Fine? As long as it’s visible.

I’d worry you’re promoting some amount of information siloing if the current general purpose instance structure doesn’t hold though.

I’ve got 2, largely out of curiosity for what defederation meant as far as user perspective.

When exporting comes online I’ll likely make an effort to spin up an instance if it’s still feasible… So there will be a 3rd cake?On the positive side I don’t think you’re going to find many people wanting to sock puppet mild takes and noise rock.

Probably true. it’s the agencies who are desperate and likely to be looking to chatGPT to outsource ad copy who are going to be looking to capitalize.

No community is really above being targeted, because the good campaigns done by people in the niche tend to be indistinguishable from good posts.

This is near inevitable if this platform takes off.

Advertisers gonna advertise.

One can hope, even as far back as Usenet the overall general self interest is always a pile-driver to the platform.

I think we’ll all be around to find out. Whether they end up federated with everyone else is up for debate, but the products still follow the eyeballs.

Advertisers especially are going to note how high engagement is compared to the other platforms, the rest will take care of itself eventually.

Isn’t the key operating word here business?

With no advertising on the line and no operations currently in place operating at anything but a loss there isn’t a commercial interest at stake.

Understandable, and yet if nobody contributes upvotes out of the same concern you end up with nothing standing out in your feed to come comment on. Kind of circular.

On the other hand having an upvote actually attached to your (and I actually mean your handle here) name would likely give it credibility in a weird sense. There’s much less incentive to blindly upvote if it essentially shows what you saw like a slug trail, but if you’re selectively giving oxygen to the best of what you see then that trail is valuable to others who value you. It’s a functional change from competing to push things for their own sake.

Im old! I come from an era where there was no such thing as OPSEC as soon as you interact with another party you cant personally name. For every consumer that was the phone company, or literally right out the door. If you transmit (login credentials, personal info, search queries) the expectation is somewhere, someone or something is logging it. Not even maliciously all the time either, sometimes I got to some of this out of boredom. The corporate Internet just kind of acts like a middle man, because that same problem never went away, just siloed into companies.

Until we get to a future like Transmetropolitan where the expectation is your online presence has some dirty laundry (and hopefully leave out the other stuff), all the bits/bytes, not just upvotes, you transmit should have a limited expectation of privacy. This is just the best/latest reminder because every hack is the same problem, only the company has incentive to keep it quiet so it doesn’t hit their bottom line.

This is super interesting to me.

I think you’re right in that the user base has the same expectations despite a huge change in the model. But it’s going to be the same on any server, your circle of trust now has to include your instance owner everywhere on the fediverse.

In general there’s no expectation you can delete every email you ever sent either, just your local copies. Most of what you see here is similar with some new attached protocols (votes, markdown etc)

I’m sure we’ll see some evolution, but the entire infrastructure is a call back to when a single service wasn’t directly linked to a single business, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.

In other words I’m not sure the concession isn’t the price you pay to not have reddit/twitter in charge. Because any other architecture that had the convenience of having a single point to delete from is also going to be a single point of failure.

Fully expected to be buried since I’m late to the party.

That’s really only half of it, there is no real erasure possible when everyone’s holding a cached copy. Personally… I kind of like it, I don’t hold any value to the words I contribute here as long as they’re for everyone.

But everything and everyone is living in concentric glass houses here.

I mean the Internet and Ann landers get awkward questions all the time.

First there was beans, and they were upvoted, and the threadiverse saw that it was good?

Like legitimately no rhyme or reason to elevate beans above any other thing.

Honestly today, just like any other ordinary day, and for no particular reason more than any other: the greater hive mind woke up and demonstrated it’s first entire federated thought.

Ipso ergo beans. In every sort form and flavour.