OpenStars
@OpenStars@piefed.social
Compassion >~ Thought
- Comment on Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations 1 day ago:
“disliking” a post isn’t going to do anything
Not true - it seems designed to increase advertising revenue for the CEO:-P. That’s… “something”, technically? 🤪
- Comment on Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations 1 day ago:
They are focusing on enshittification
It is what they want - for them it is a “feature” to exist surely inside of their echo chambers. MANY Lemmy instances - hexbear.net and Lemmy.ml to name just a couple - are the same, banning people who even remotely disagree with them.
Profit-seeking is not the only cause of enshittification.
- Comment on Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations 1 day ago:
I like the way that PieFed implements this.
“Highly contentious users” i.e. those who are consistently heavily downvoted by “trusted instances” (I don’t know the actual thresholds but imagine someone who receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes - and e.g. hexbear.net can be federated with but not “trusted” so that downvote brigading can be eliminated, unless ofc they use their non-HB alts but while nothing is perfect, every ounce of protection does help:-) are labeled, but there is currently no way that I am aware of to actually remove their content. Still, it helps to see that automatically-applied label as you scroll down, so that you can skip past it or at least realize that a reply is going to fall on deaf ears. People’s reputations precede us irl so why not online as well, where it is so much easier to measure?
Individual content - posts and comments - that are highly contentious, according to user-defined thresholds, can be either automatically collapsed or even hidden. I personally disable both of these, but if someone wants to not see highly contentious content then this makes it happen for them. Similarly there are keyword filters - again nothing will ever be perfect but if you want to see less of e.g. Musk or Trump, then this is a method to help reduce the incoming flood of content related to such.
Communities have access to “community-specific” voting patterns. I know less about this aspect but generally the entire community or perhaps an individual post could be limited to community-specific rules, like a member can vote but a non-member drive-by commentor might be disallowed under certain conditions. Not every community should be this way and I hope most won’t enable these features, but they are necessary sometimes - e.g. a community for and by women needs to exclude all the “don’t you know that I am such a nice man"-splaining that will inevitably arise.
Anyway I love the hierarchy that distributes the work of moderation all the way from instance admins (for e.g. illegal content) through community mods (who have access to software to help them) and ultimately powers the end-users to control their own recipient of content, which they can change over time - e.g. rather than leave social media entirely they could enable some of the contentious user and/or keyword filter controls and thereby attain for themselves a break from the noise and hubub that the entire internet tends to prefer to throw at us all the time.
In contrast, whatever little moderation that Bluesky has is obviously insufficient - the problems of outright monotonization spam and high contentious users seems to have overwhelmed whatever capacity there was to handle such.
PieFed has really high me hope for the entire Fediverse.
- Comment on Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations 2 days ago:
Moderation seems sorely lacking on Bluesky. And did you read the comment in the OP article? It offered “I am such a nice man” vibes, though technically not entirely wrong either, yet failing to consider replies not offered in good faith nor the consent of the recipient to receive such shocks to their systems.
- Comment on 'Godfather of AI' says tech giants can't profit from their astronomical investments unless human labor is replaced 2 days ago:
They want feudalism back. Ngl, the technology available today might make it work for them.
- Comment on When Everything Is Fake, What’s the Point of Social Media? 2 weeks ago:
Bots trained from bots, talking to bots, governed by THE ALGORITHM… surely this will end well.
- Comment on Kohler Wants to Put a Tiny Camera in Your Toilet and Analyze the Contents 2 weeks ago:
Worse, you have to provide your own shit! 💩
- Comment on Imgur's Community Is In Full Revolt Against Its Owner 2 months ago:
Tbf that's a big deal for Mastodon aka Fediverse, not so much on the Threadiverse with K/Mbin, Lemmy, or PieFed.
And the tools that exist to help are laughably bad - the last time I tried the auto-selector website it chose for me hexbear.net, and I noticed Lemmy.ml was prominently displayed up high in their listing (surely the Windows-using centrists and conservatives on Reddit will have no problems joining that extremist leftist instance of FOSS enthusiasts... r-r-right?!).
- Comment on Chinese-developed AI system revolutionizes industrial fermentation process 2 months ago:
Do yourself a favor and skip the fluff piece and move straight to the pubmed article linked after it, unless you really enjoy reading sentences like:
It serves as an 'intelligent brain'...
- Comment on AI slop is ruining all of our favorite places to scroll 2 months ago:
It may not be much, but it's our garbage and a waste of time content! 🤪
- Comment on Developer survey shows trust in AI coding tools is falling as usage rises 2 months ago:
Counterpoint: they want number go up.
Pro Tip: it doesn't even matter if number go up, when they know how to suck up to even higher-ups.
- Comment on Grok 4 seems to consult Elon Musk to answer controversial questions 3 months ago:
So... a direct message line to Musk you say?
- Comment on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment 5 months ago:
We should all leave Reddit and move to the Threadiverse! Oh wait.... 😁
- Comment on A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 8 months ago:
No no no no no, you are supposed to reassure me with nice-sounding "factual" statements!? Everything will be okay bc... Cap't America, or sumtin.
What I know is that if people have principles but not convictions, then they have neither.
And unfortunately, greed is a principle.:-(
- Comment on A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 8 months ago:
What will really blow all of our minds, is that once we get this tiny little matter of the fate of the USA under control (I'm mostly joking here bc I think there's a strong, >50% chance of that never happening), there is still the fact that climate change has radically altered our word forever.
And the internet too.
And globalization as well.
Oh and automation likewise.
Meanwhile, to deal with all of THAT, we have... "Congress".
No matter what, things will never be the same again, nor would those of us who think about it even want to. You can't un-pop a bubble, and why would we want to make a new one? (bc that worked out so well the last time)
Damnit, I'm not trying to be fatalistic here.
- Comment on A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 8 months ago:
it's not going to be simple
Sadly, while the myriad ways that this could play out from here are yet unknown, some things really are just flat *that* simple that we can guarantee them.
e.g. tell a child "you better do this before I count to 5! 1... 2... 3... 4... 4 and a half... 4 and a quarter... 4 and uh..." - do you see what we've lost? This was a test, in the same way that every single thing everywhere is always a test. The goalposts are now shifted: this much they can do - there is no use pretending that we will suddenly decide to halt their *next* set of actions, or the ones after that, or the ones after that, etc. "First they came for" is happening now, LIVE.
The ruling by the Supreme Court that a sitting President could do anything he ever wanted - including assassination of any American citizen anytime for any reason, iirc without much if anything in the way of oversight (although I never did get clarity on that point) - *already* ended our "democracy", months before the voting. Biden may not have chosen to use it, but the goalposts had already been shifted even then.
Even if we had elections again 4 years from now, and I see no reason that we would bother (for the same reason that Trump promised us that he had never so much as heard of Project 2025, during the election, except in this case he's outright said that we will not), the ratchet has already been sunk in, and the do-nothing Democrats will do... absolutely nothing about it. Man I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist or even a subversive agent but... the facts and conclusions should stand or fall on their own merits regardless.
This is the new normal. You've seen the link I'm sure, but here it is again for easy reference: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no. And the Democrats are silent, to save their own families from the death threats that they are literally and actually receiving (https://www.reddit.com/r/Connecticut/comments/1ieiom5/senator_chris_murphy_on_why_the_democrats_are/?share_id=Ce7meV-39mMJsjvxXgn9N).
Democracy has been on the decline now since before I was alive, so it's not exactly unexpected, just nerve wracking as we go through this transition. It's also simply a natural consequence: this is what the people *want*: to not have to make decisions anymore. We could have... well, in the past we could have done *things*, whereas instead, this is what we've done: nothing. And it is what we will continue to do, I predict, bc it's what we are good at, so long as the price of eggs and gas isn't too awfully high...
- Comment on Everyone knows your location. 8 months ago:
Would using a VPN even help?
Wouldn't that just slow you down, cause some websites to not work, and leave your device showing up as a giant black hole / empty spot without traffic where "expected" traffic should be?
Although at this point I'm wondering if I should be nervous about website traffic showing up to Lemmy on a work computer, due to mismatching priorities of it (freedom) vs. the new USA federal administration (which nearly every company - including and most notably to me Proton, a provider of free VPN access - seems to be sucking up to).
- Comment on How one YouTuber is trying to poison the AI bots stealing her content 8 months ago:
Marumph, gargle flasker?
- Comment on Elon Musk email to X staff: ‘we’re barely breaking even’ 9 months ago:
That won't stop him from lording it over and blaming his subordinates as if it were personally their faults.
- Comment on Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram explode after Meta ends fact-checking 9 months ago:
Friendica
- Comment on A study found that X’s algorithm now loves two things: Republicans and Elon Musk 11 months ago:
- Comment on Google's AI chatbot tells student seeking help with homework "please die" 11 months ago:
It misunderstood the advice to turn it off and back on again.
/s in case it's not obvious to someone wanting to treat this seriously.
