And remind ourselves that it find very easily happen to the fediverse! All it takes is mass defederation, some vulnerability, anything ego driven.. humans still run this platform and it wouldn't take much to bring it down.
the Fediverse is growing, but still small. If anything (as much as I'm personally enjoying it) at this stage of growth, it would be still statistically likely to fade to irrelevance in a few years, so it would not even be big news.
Seeing a couple of the Big Socials being dismantled this way at the same time is... something else. I'm getting tired too of all this coverage about Twitter and Reddit and start wishing Lemmy had filtering by keyword, but rationally I know it's granted.
thanks, I was starting to look into some of the apps, but so far I haven't found one that works better for me (on Android) than the mobile web version. I have never looked specifically into keyword filtering though.
I definitely can't log on without hearing about how any even remotely popular instance is actively working to create an echo chamber for the right by defederating anything that might even consider allowing a community to the left of centrist dems.
I think, given what I've seen so far, is that there's going to basically be faschie status quo lemmy and then everyone else lemmy.
Because capitalism is so great and superior if you let it's adherents so much as think there's literally any other option it all crumbles to dust immediately 😂
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.
There is from a sociological standpoint. The Twitter format is one of several ways we've found people can replace the tea party (that is, the general style of soirée, not the political movement in the US, nor the act of mischief in Boston leading up to the US Revolutionary War). Granted, we have to buy our own snacks, but we save on the commute across town.
But I don't think the Twitter format for communities and threads is patented.
That said, I expect X (Ex-) to go the way of truth social and Gab and Parler, at which point someone can try again.
So as another part of the X Titanic sinks below the depths, it is news for anyone else trying to build their alternative, for-profit or otherwise.
Considering we now are looking at context-aware LLMs, I wonder if they could make a smarter moderation system that lets users know when they used a hate dog whistle (perhaps, inadvertently) and here's an alternative phrasing that circumvents the dog whistle.
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.
Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Their content filtering/categorisation was also quite good. They're one of the few sites I can think of that had a bit more clarification than a basic "NSFW/Sensitive Content" tag, even if it came rather late, so if something was marked correctly, you could get an idea of what kind of NSFW content it was, without unblurring the image.
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.
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.
This feels like Andy Warhol's art combined with TPB's court processing.
Andy earned money buy making art using other's art and TPB sold ads while telling you where you could aquire content illegaly, while never actually hosting any of the content.
Where does the line go? If I write a book the is similar to someone else's book, is that illegal? If I use a tool to help me write? Which tools are allowed and which are not?
It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
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.
I’d say that was a more controversial opinion. From a purist perspective I tend to believe that intellectual property in general is not ethical and stifles innovation.
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.