Sure, they’re being regulated in other countries. I guess in the EU for example, it’s the Digital Services Act and other legislation which mandate moderation, cutting down on hate and disinformation. They’d need to be sanctioned if they don’t comply. Or leave the market if they don’t like the law…

Though it’s a crutch. I also regularly get one or two random downvotes for random uncontroversial stuff. I get some proportion of downvotes if I give a nuanced opinion and/or dispell urban legends. And I regularly get very few (if at all) votes by helping someone in the comments or giving the correct answer to a question, while other people get 800 upvotes for posting a meme picture, which they just took from someplace else… Don’t get me wrong, this might be as good as we can do. But I don’t think voting works particularly well for what it’s trying to achieve.

And it doesn’t really help me. If I do the default sort, it’s mostly news articles and pictures that show up and have a score of several hundreds. And the interesting posts are buried somewhere. So I kind of disregard the votes while browsing Lemmy, making them kind of meaningless for me and that purpose. YMMV. But I think I either need to unsubscribe from all those communities, or use several distinct subscription feeds.

Saying: “Google says stalking is a crime in 50 US states.” gave me 29 downvotes. The question was: “Would it be legal to crowdfund a licensed private detective to investigate a public figure and publish their results publicly?”

Heheh, valid objection. Guess Newton wasn’t the only smart person in history 😆 And drama has always been part of human history… But we still hear those names over 300 years later. Along with a lot of other names of people whose results are taught in university today. But yeah, that hypothetical situation (Newton’s achievements in mathematics being replaced by Leibnitz) would make a good Dr. Who episode.

Possible. But then we’d need somebody else to develop calculus and write a Principia Mathematica and lay the groundworks for the age of enlightenment.

Bring a book or newspaper/magazine. Those people are the minority but it’s still fairly common to see people read on the train or at the bus stop.

Yes. And mathematics. And a key figure in the scientific revolution. Probably also one of the most intelligent people ever.

I’m playing “Stray” right now. I think it’s awesome. (It is from 2022 btw)

Why not a linked list? Or a hash-table?

It’s far more pronounced on the internet anyways. People come here to vent. And the (social media) platforms incentivise them to do so, the way they’re build. I’d say it’s far less a thing in real life.

More. Because they’re more involved with the actual business, doing evil. But the amount depends on what they’re doing.

I think it’s difficult to impossible to prove what went into an AI model. At least by looking at the final product. You’d need to look at their harddisks and find a verbatim copy of your text as training meterial as far as I know.

By the way, isn’t the whole point of Pinterest, to pin other people’s copyrighted images from other places of the web and make them accessible from within the platform? To me that whole business model sounds similar to what AI companies do. Take other people’s content and make an own product out of it.

Well, last time I checked the news, content moderation was still a thing in Europe. They’re mandated to do it. And Meta doesn’t like to lose millions and millions of users… So they abide. We have a different situation with AI. Some companies have restricted their AI models due to them fearing the EU come up with an unfavorable legislation. And Europe sucks at coming up with AI regulations. So Meta and a few others have started disallowing use of their open-weight models in Europe. I as a German don’t get a license to run llama3.2.

You can do a lot of things with regulation. You can force theaters to be built so some specification so they won’t catch on fire, build amusement parks with safety in mind. Not put toxic stuff in food. All these regulations work fine. I don’t see why it should be an entirely different story with this kind if technology.

But with that said, we all suck at getting ahold of the big tech companies. They can get away with way more than they should be able to. Everywhere in the world. And ultimately I don’t think the situation in the US is entirely hopeless. I just don’t see any focus on this. And I see some other major issues that need to be dealt with first.

I mean you’re correct. Most of the Google, Meta and Amazons are from the USA. We import a lot of the culture, good and bad, with them. Or it’s the other way round, idk. Regardless, we get both culture and some of the big companies. Still, I think we’re not in the same situation (yet).

Well, there isn’t really a way around automated filtering. Spammers and malicious actors also send their stuff in bulk. And those big tech companies already have human content moderators. Usually in some poorer countries and it’s a horrible job. I suppose there just arent enough humans to also deal with the flood of spam, manually.

These systems are far from perfect. And I’m not really an expert. I don’t use Meta’s platforms. I can’t tell much from that screenshot. It’s missing the URL and it hints at some rule that might be shown below.

And I didn’t want to say “trust Meta”. Quite the opposite. I just think this one specific claim could be true. Not everything is a conspiracy theory. We know they have automated spamfilters. And we know these make a lot of mistakes. Very similar with what other spamfilters do with short URLs. I’d say the simplest explanation is: their spamfilter sucks. Not that they somehow conspired, wrote additional software to deliberately target Pixelfed instances, but just when it’s a short post… No. I think in this instance it’s the simple explanation. But yeah, gwnerally: Don’t trust and of the big tech companies. They don’t act in your interest at all.

We just should take care not to spread misinformation. We need to stick with the truth. And It’s not like the article says. And what they’re infering is wrong, too. And seems that Meta didn’t respond, isn’t up to date anymore, either. (Given Meta tells the truth, but I don’t see any reason to doubt this. This is exactly what happens with spamfilters all the time. And why would they reverse it immediately, if there’s more to the story?)

Other than that, I agree. If somebody chooses to use a platform like that, they get entangled in some soulless machinery. And that machinery isn’t there to help the user, but mainly to uphold whatever a big tech company likes or needs. Mainly profit and control. Terms and conditions apply.

Yeah, the internet itself isn’t the issue here. It’s kind of exactly your vision. Owned by countless different entites across the world, who all work together, interconnect and make it what it is. We already have that.

The issue are the big platforms who sit on top of it all. But we don’t need to invent anything or change any technology for that. Anyone is free not to type “Facebook” into their address bar or install the app. It’s not a technological problem

Has already been refuted in the other post: https://lemm.ee/post/52524220

I believe it was an honest mistake by the spamfilter.

Agreed. Note however, that it’s not only open software that is a niche. There are many closed services as well that don’t get any traction. For example the several email providers that don’t read your private mails. They’re a niche, too and people keep using GMail. Or other shops than Amazon. People often just use the dominating service. That doesn’t really have to do anything with open software or anything. I think it’s a bit of convenience and mainly people use what they’re familiar with.

Unfortunately I don’t know much about Friendica. I heard it has privacy, friend circles/groups, different post types, a feed and interconnects with other platforms. But I’ve never used it myself, because I don’t really do social media except this platform here (Lemmy). I think Mastodon is very popular, but it’s not alike Facebook at all. Other than that I can recommend writing a blog or having a website… But you can’t really share family photos there. Or one of the Linktree clones, so people can at least find you and get your contact details if they want.

And yes, I also don’t think these platforms are immutable. It’s just impossibly hard to overcome. But all the current services have started somewhere. And this isn’t the early internet anymore. It’s a different story for Google Search, they’ve been here a long time. But all the Facebooks etc had to outcompete someone and overcome the network effect. And they did so successfully.

Hmmh, the network effect is the opposite side. It’s the effect that binds people to platforms. Platforms are just as useful as the network of people they connect you to. We need to overcome the network effect here.

And that’s really, really hard. I mean look at how Bluesky does it. They invest a lot of money to make it possible. They waited for the right moment and sort of caught their competition with their pants down. Furthermore, they did some marketing stunts like the invite-only period to hype their own product. And have journalists and influencers talk about it.

The product needs to be excellent. And even that’s not enough. If you’re as good as the competition, or just slightly better… There isn’t really an incentive for people to switch. Companies like Google fail at inventing a product that competes with Facebook.

Ultimately, I don’t see a good way of competing with social media platforms. People just don’t care about their privacy, so that’s not something you can win them over with. And even if their platform is operated by a bad person like Elon Musk, and has a really toxic atmosphere for better part of the last decade… The majority still doesn’t really care. It took him (Musk) to deliberately run X into a brick wall to get things going. Something like Reddit taking away user freedom, clamping down on all kinds of things, selling user data etc doesn’t do much in that context.

I’m a bit disheartened as you can tell. I’m always advocating for Free Software, more ethical alternatives and for people to care about their freedom. But in my experience that’s a niche thing. I don’t really get through to regular people. I kind of make the best of it. I have a profile on the Fediverse. If people want to talk to me, they can come here and talk to me. But yeah, that does away with my high school friends.

Edit: And by the way, are you sure Friendica posts go to the whole Fediverse all the times? They have groups and privacy features. If these features are implemented well, they shoud stop your posts from propagating to arbitrary places.