Some day, we’ll have a technology sub that isn’t polluted with Twitter “news”.
It’s a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.
Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch platforms combust due to their own arrogance.
We’ll save you a seat, but you’ll need to bring your own popcorn.
Anyway I’m glad this shitshow happened because it was a much needed boost for federated software like Lemmy.
These were weeks where decades happened.
Remember the old memes? Those were the days…
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.
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 😂
Elon calls them Rapid Unplanned Disassemblies.
Turns out X is giving it to itself. Ironic.
Fuck waitin’ for you to get it on your own
X gon’ deliver to ya
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.
Let’s hope “X” continues down the path to it’s own demise.
I’m still waiting for any article that talks about the tech that Twitter is supposed to be so famous for.
They made the popular CSS framework Bootstrap, which led to thousands of new websites for a while looking the same. 😅😬
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.
This is a bit of a learning experience though.
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.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
I’m not a huge OpenAI fan, but it’s not yet been determined that they acted illegally. I believe the matter is still being pursued in court.
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.
Immorally then.
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.
but that something trained on public material is privately owned.
Is that really a problem? Is a create something new based on public knowledge, should I not be able to profit from it?
I learn to paint from YouTube, should I paint for free now?
I’ll admit that the scope of ChatGPT is MUCH bigger than one person painting.
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.
I’m hoping that’ll work on Lemmy as well.
Does anyone know where the normal people are going though? I suspect Mastodon and tiktok? At least the young ones.
All this, Ryan said, explains why the trolls “are getting more extreme and desperate.” The pool of people available to get attention from is shrinking, so the only way to keep the engagement rates as high is to say wilder and nastier things. But eventually, there will be so few people on Twitter left to aggravate that even white nationalist dogwhistling and Holocaust denialism won’t work.
Mastodon would be my personal preference, but Bluesky seems pretty noisy to me, which seems like what people want from microblogging sites (I’m more of a reddit/lemmy/kbin style person, myself.) The question is whether Bluesky pulls a Google+ and stays invite-only for so long that they miss their own hype train.
So you tried it? I haven’t known anyone that have tried it. A journalist said that the existing users are rude about newbies because they want it to themselves but I’ve seen a lot of bad reporting about Lemmy. Did you find it cranky about new users?
existing users are rude about newbies because they want it to themselves
Huh. The irony, considering that this is basically what people who jumped to BlueSky said about Mastodon.
They weren’t strictly wrong about entrenched Mastodon users, but turning around to pull a reverse-Uno card about the whole thing is entertaining to me.
Keep in mind that I barely use it and only follow a few people I followed from TwiX.
People seemed friendly enough but there is a lot of self-serving navel gazing, and it seems like the “Discover” feed is full of inside jokes/references that I don’t use the app enough to get.
My first day the big thing was complaining about how terrible and bigoted the devs of bluesky were, for something they said that I never did figure out, and the subsequent complaining about people complaining about the devs. Very dramatic.
To be fair, I’m sure if you just followed the people you cared about, and avoided the discover feed, it would be pretty Twitter-like.
Also, there’s a character limit and you can’t edit. These aren’t technical limitations anymore, like they were for Twitter at the beginning, so they must be design decisions.
If I had an invite left I’d give you one.
Also, there’s a character limit and you can’t edit.
That kills any interest I might have had. I make embarrassing typos often enough that editing is a must-have feature.
I would expect that to be an upcoming feature, similar to how Threads is bolting on things like DMs. That’s probably part of why it still requires an invite.
I have come over a few Reddit communities who moved to Discord of all things. I don’t get why. That isn’t even remotely the same type of discussion platform.
I’m really not a fan of Discord. Why would anyone use a platform that’s not accessible without making an account and requires an invite to each group? If it wasn’t branded towards gamers I don’t think it would have much appeal.
Imo it’s because sites like reddit make communities too open. It’s common knowledge that once a sub regularly makes it to r/all, it loses all identity and joins the vague soup of r/all content which everyone upvotes with no regard for the source.
A lot of people don’t want one big page with all the biggest communities thrown together. They just want to follow what they like and nothing else.
That said, the chat room format of discord is a pretty awkward stand-in for a forum type of community.
Discord has its uses but it’s very much not the same. I often can’t even find my question I asked an hour later.
At least for me, Mastodon replaced Twitter and Lemmy replaced Reddit. But then, I’m not “normal” and find the Fediverse to be endlessly fascinating.
This is speculation but I suspect people are already oversubscribed to social media and just spending a bit longer in other places they already go. So if they’re on Discord, they’re probably just spending more time there.
Offline?
If your main social network is on fire, you’re probably just going to put the phone down and do something else, especially if you’re not on another social network.
The learning curve with getting used to a new one might be a more than what most people really want to do with their time and energy, so they might just be curbing their Twitter use.
Don’t forget Threads.
People stayed there?
It’s fun to snark on threads but yes, it had 100 million signups in a week and 50 million people still using it.
First of all, does anyone trust threads to tell us real numbers? How would anyone check? Second of all, no way am I ever using them and I blocked them on my Mastodon account. If they every come to Lemmy, I’ll block them here as well. I’m not shitting on threads, the parent company has always been full of shitty people.
I don’t support Meta and they’re not a good company. I was merely answering the question about where people went.
Meta is a public company though so they could get in legal trouble for false reports, and there’s also a bunch of ways advertisers can check metrics.
Most folks I follow went to Mastodon. I even met some new folks, including some that are local!
Some are still on twitter even though a small number of us begged/pleaded with them.
One went to blue sky.
Most folks I follow went to Mastodon.
I like hearing that.
Salon.com articles always sound like a 21 year old Redditor wrote them.
“The grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex are not okay.”
Who writes this lmao. Do they spin a wheel of buzzwords and just write a sentence with whatever comes up?
It made sense to me and I didn’t even look twice. Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Jordon Peterson, etc. = the grifters that she talks about in the article, and the “troll-industrial complex” are their paid followers or their suckered in fan boys. It’s been a thing since 2015 at least.
Yeah I mean if a 4 year old talks to me I can usually decipher what they are trying to say.
Amanda Marcotte is the author, a reasonably distinguished and well known figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte
Guess she just knows her audience is buzzword-craving 21 year old Redditors then.
If you write for salon.com, you are not distinguished. It’s a basically a left wing tabloid and should not be misconstrued as a news website.
Could you elaborate exactly what you find problematic about that wording?`Those terms seems to be a pretty accurate description of the phenomenon.
It’s cringe and embarrassing to me. That’s all I’m saying.
Always remember to never feed the trolls. It’s a very basic Internet rule that we should have continued to follow. Block and move on
i think in this case we also want to consider…
do not click a twitter link
… as the article states, it is the traffic, itself, that they want.
Even better. Don’t click on Twitter and don’t engage with trolls in any format.
deleted by creator
Sounds like a surefire way to get Donald Trump elected again.
Ignoring the trolls caused 2016 to happen. At that point, it became clear that the trolls have gathered in power, have organized politically and have explicitly made their methodology into the leading political force for the Republican party.
There are probably ways to counter misinformation without giving the bad actors involved any additional platform.
They already have a platform. Its called Twitter.
They’ll have that platform whether or not you post a reply.
But posting a direct reply will give them additional attention, from your own followers and from algorithmic boosting.
If simply replying to bad actors with facts and demanding decency helped in any way, they wouldn’t have gotten as relevant as they are.
That’s all good theory or whatever, but you ain’t gonna stop Donald Trump (or DeSantis) from getting boosted to the top. Certainly not when Elon is in charge of Twitter.
Of course, because these already have a whole established follower base. But it can prevent upcoming reactionary outrage mongers from gaining momentum.
Keep in mind that I didn’t say to ignore them entirely, I said that replying directly is a bad approach. Because the people who already follow them likely won’t listen to reason, and it might only highlight it to potential targets to be radicalized. But bad rhetoric can be countered and refuted without direct attribution. You could instead reply to a screenshot with the handle cut out or just speak on the topic without bringing up who is stirring shit this time around.
Ehhh… more like the opposite. The mainstream media engaged the trolls on a mass scale and the golden turd won.
I thought it was the same thing that happens with these “content creator” in every niche. Over saturation requiring these greater extremes to get more attention.
