but it does make sense to me for why people who are concerned with the viewership of their content would want to move back.
Eh, I wonder if that need for attention is the problem with social media in general. I've really enjoyed the lower stakes discussions with experts here. I'm also digging the absence of noise generated by anonymous drive-by weirdos trying to maximize their internet points. Mind you, I think the structure of the fediverse is a net negative, but high-quality moderation on awful is more than accounting for that AND it doesn't have all the built in attention-economy dark pattern stuff, so it's easy to check real quick then put down, which is nice.
If you compare our buttcoin to /r/buttcoin today, for example, the difference is vast and obvious.
It remains to be seen if the New Management at /r/sneerclub can perform at the same level, but based on the news, I can see why someone might want to fire up the ole popcorn machine at this particular point in time.
Oh, one thing I have seen minority folks ask for (and be ignored+condescended at about!) is better moderation tools. It's tough to moderate big instances, particularly when under direct attack by malicious users.
Edit: oops, you've got it covered. Apologies for, in fact, being that guy!
You're just being asked to be thoughtful before opening your mouth. Is that so awful?
We're at an inflection point where millions of people might be able to break free of the big social media companies. People are disgusted at the incumbents and are looking for someplace, anyplace to land.
Unfortunately, "Don't be a dick" is in the critical path to success for the fediverse, We, the currently existing community, have to make it worth their while to jump to fedi, because if it's a hassle, they're just going to go somewhere else like bsky or Threads. Then we'll all dragged along via network effects, riding the Wheel of Pain for another decade or so until that platform enshitifies and we maybe get another bite at the apple
You're really illustrating the problem the OP is trying to fix quite nicely.
Instead of dropping a turd on our doorstep, why not have a policy of not commenting on stuff in places that you don't really belong, like an normal person would in their regular life.
BTW, having a fedi-wide stream of popular posts was a mistake.
Apologies if I'm talking out of turn, I want to do my best to be a good ally but I recognize that I've got some serious blind spots!
With that caveat in mind, I would suggest that the problem making fedi unwelcoming is two-pronged:
1 ) It looks to me that fedi inherited the original sin of microblogging, which is that the system naturally rewards the spiciest hot takes that go with the local social currents.
2 ) Fedi's culture was established by FOSS geeks rebelling against for-profit social media.
This has led to most instances becoming machines for manufacturing hot takes are going to have an unacceptably high mayonnaise content, highlighting the importance of your points 1 and 2! Nerds have to learn to slow down and think before shooting their mouth off, but it's so tough to cut through the weird high school grievance politics.
(That mindset is a big part of what generated the whole problematic LessWrong/Techfash wave; your post fits in nicely with awful.system's core mission!)
My impression is that Twitter avoided this because it was initially colonized by a more representative cross-section of society. This can be somewhat remediated via your points 3 and 4, but will face resistance -- which kind of kills the fun of using fediverse for so many of the fedi-curious. This is a big problem when people can just go to bsky or whatever and find much of their old Twitter network already setting up shop and reconnecting with their communities.
Thankfully, some individual instances (like awful!) seem to get it, but for the most part the poison is already baked in, and it's hard to unbake a cake and begin again. It will also be tough to get the existing core fedi community to understand that no level of "technical excellence" can fix what is fundamentally a social issue. Unlike baseball ghosts, actual people are under no obligation to come just because you built it!
Other than the kind of long, tough reckoning that society as a whole needs to face, it's tough to see an answer. Do you think it would be possible to somehow begin and again have a "second genesis" of fedi, now that the wider world is more invested in finding alternatives to "big social?"
I'm a fan of Clonezilla, which is a debian-derived live distro designed specifically to clone partitions as well as whole disks. If you're comfortable with how Linux represents devices, it's as close as you can get to training-wheels-included imaging for free.
BIG WARNING: Be sure to write down the BitLocker key before you begin, or else it'll be a bad time!
Ya know, it's funny that you point this out, it's a thing about their style of argument that's been nagging at me for a while.
There's a pattern in the promptfondlers' propaganda where they claim that they they've identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a "truth oracle" in the compsci sense of the word "oracle." If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.
I guess that's true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.
Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just can't get there from here, but try telling them that.
There's a great sneer-novel about simulationists called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin.
The villains of the story are a group of TESCREAL stand-ins who style themselves as the "Simmurai." They have the goal of breaking the "simulation" just the same as the authors of the (hilarious) paper you've shared. They have a very similar tone, which to my ears sounds like a serial killer winding themselves up to do the deed. The big twist is that the Simmurai have been unwittingly suborned by a Lovecraftian horror that has bent their plan to its own ends. The only thing standing in their way is a small group of working class millenials from Ohio, who get tangled up in the story because they once shot up some space drugs in a Denny's parking lot and can therefore see the true nature of the universe (maybe).
BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace "robot overlords" in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, "The Authoritarian Peril":
with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:
A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur's Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.
o7___o7 @ o7___o7 @awful.systems Posts 9Comments 935Joined 2 yr. ago 