the_last_pigeon
shiggy
it's look who it is
User ID: 62
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Desire to vote and political knowledge are spectrums and, I'd assume, correlated. Everyone above a certain level of desire to vote does so. Get-out-the-vote efforts lower the level. Thus I'd figure the resulting voters are not going to vote at random, because their level of political knowledge is better than that; you'd have to reach pretty amazing levels of turnout before you hit people with little enough knowledge to vote randomly or otherwise in a hideously misinformed fashion.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Not sure that Jan 6 impacted the Jan 5 runoffs too much, although I like the rest of your analysis.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Right, there had already been a considerable amount of circus.
Can you substantiate that claim about Fetterman's mental health? I think it's more likely that his mental capacity will be fine by next January and it's just his speech and hearing that look bad.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Some fella blames candidate quality:
To me, the most interesting dimension of the poll: Dems running an avg of 8 points ahead of Senate control preference (R+4 on average). Illustrates key dynamic of the race -- a favorable environment for Rs v. bad candidates -- and helps square with the national picture
The poll results in question (Oct. 2022 Times/Siena): percentage-wise, "which party should control the senate" is more Republican, but "which candidate am I voting for in my election" is more Democratic.
Not saying that's the explanation, but it's an explanation.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Hey, I can't complete sentences in a stressful environment either. :)
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?
Violence. You're describing a violent ideology. David Lane and Adolf Hitler encouraged (understatement...) the assassination of their political opponents. "Not killing people you disagree with" is a pretty good social norm. Its benefits are self-evident: I don't want to disagree with people who advocate for it! Anyone who disagrees with it should be shunned and removed from any discussion space.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
OK, can you name people as notorious for doing assassinations and causing deaths as those two, that it would be acceptable to support?
OK, so what's your solution to Jews being overrepresented in these institutions, assuming you think it's a problem? Actually, why do you think it's a problem? I would make this comment more high-effort by guessing answers to those questions but I don't think I have a good enough mental model to be using it for that yet.
Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability
By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.
That won't do much (WaPo):
“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)
To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).
The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.
If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.
Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.
Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?
(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)
I wrote a response to this idea as a top-level post above: https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/32443?context=8#context. To summarize, I disagree that he has a chance at turning around Twitter.
Supporting Stalin, Mao, or Che would be a ban on sight from any site I moderate, and a lot of my local (one-hop federating) Mastodon instances also ban tankies on sight. Unfortunately there are a lot of idiots that support that stuff out there. But, like, fair example.
Moderation: I agree that twitter has a lot of automated moderation. Unfortunately, a good chunk of incoming Bad Shit escapes it because of the endless creativity of our great species, so that on the front lines you generally forget about the automation (until you have to fix some false positives, or do maintenance). This implies, but I want to explicitly say, that the percentage that escapes does not go to zero over time, even though you're constantly upgrading your systems. They vastly outnumber you and are always trying to post their crap, because often there's a financial incentive to do so.
Engagement: Yeah, people are saying the site may die; that's entertaining and will bring people back, but is more importantly a temporary trend. I don't think we can say how many people are coming back due to the new moderation policies, although a lower bound on that is the number of people talking about them, which is certainly a fair number (but niche in the grand scheme of things, a fact I can appreciate as someone knowledgeable about Mastodon administration).
(1) Yes, there are a steady stream of problems addressable by automation, but those have never been a problem. SREs exist for the other problems.
Shit just falls over and you won't know why. That's just how these systems are. You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.
To put meat on the bones, see this list of common things SREs deal with, or this log of the SRE chatroom for Wikipedia & friends.
(2) Change is unavoidable and constant. There are security patches for your dependencies released continuously and you will update your system or face the consequences. Often times your dependency is an underfunded open-source thingy, despite your best efforts to avoid those, and thus the only way to get the new code is to use the newest version of the thingy, which means you might have to upgrade all of your code that uses the thingy.
(3) Regarding "pushing the systems back into a stable state" - then you're gonna have the same problem again unless you fix the root cause, which, again, requires code changes.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Yes. As a troll, your goal is others' reactions, which there are simply more of on English twitter.
I don't browse non-English twitter, but I think Elon's gonna cut non-English moderation staff even faster than he cuts English staff. Only a matter of time.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
A "truly free speech platform" is one of the most-tried ideas on the Internet and it ends the same way every time. To pull it off, you'd need to know at least a little bit about social dynamics and moderation, which Elon isn't doing a good job of demonstrating.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I don't think WaPo would pull something like that quote entirely out of their ass. Or if they've done something like that (invented a direct quote), I'm interested.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
We're evaluating Trump as a potential "leader of the populist right", and Supreme Court nominations are entirely unrelated to one's competency in that role, as Evinceo notes.
Except to the degree that you can get yourself elected as President, in which case just say that, instead of how he "appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term and others".
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
So what I'm getting from you and other replies is "trolls/Bad Content never impacted the average user's twitter experience because they're there to read what specific famous people post". I buy that. I guess it's not a big deal until people start posting CSAM and shit, which I guess you might be able to do with a skeleton crew.
Still, then you get people using the site to run harassment campaigns or whatever. Arguably that's what the site is already used for, some people just don't call it that, so whatever.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))
People should be able to leave conversations for any reason at all, including no reason. Posting is not a job. I don't think giving people flak for "ghosting" helps foster a healthy community.
Other platforms won't feel the need to pay for Twitter traffic, because they don't depend on it. What this change will do is enrage users who find it useful or even financially necessary to link to other platforms.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
(I'm assuming you're saying "ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr made a crappy post, people called ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr on it, and ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr didn't engage with them".) I think the sin there is making the crappy post, not failing to engage.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Preliminary: I'm assuming (this being a gender discussion) that by "options other than traditional families", you mean gay/lesbian/trans parents, not single-parent households, which are obviously fucked.
Trans parents may be at higher risk of suicide, but that's covered by "let's not have parents who are suicide risks", and not related to them being trans specifically.
So we're left with "gay/lesbian/trans-not-a-suicide-risk parents". I claim they're just as fine. I offer two citations from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LGBT_parenting&oldid=1126262442#Research: this Australian Psychological Society literature review that cites a shitload of papers, and this amici in Obergefell. I find it unlikely that all of the papers cited therein are shit, but happy to spot-check a few.
Anyway, you also say the stigma is justified due to them being annoying. I am unaware of any ethical system that supports stigmatizing people because you find them annoying. Stigmatizing someone clearly does them more harm than any amount of "whining" could balance out. What's wrong with stigmatizing whining itself? Whining is pretty annoying. Also, you don't have to listen to them!
Moreover, I concur with @drmanhattan16 that you have no evidence that they have to whine. It is not an analytic truth. So, you have to demonstrate that there's something innate to the collective existence of non-traditional families that creates whining. I can't see any. But that's besides the point, because I've already established that whining isn't severe enough to justify stigmatizing them.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Any updates on the volunteer data? "Who knows" is perfectly acceptable, but I'm just very curious about it. I think it's a neat experiment and would like to see this on other websites.
Anyone got sources that present GamerGate from the "it was about ethics in video game journalism" angle?
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