Notices by Erin Kissane (kissane@mas.to), page 2

I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.

Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.

I was going to dip out for a week or two for vacation starting tomorrow morning but uuuhhh I’m gonna call it, see you later.

Persistently shocked by how much of adult life is dealing with the consequences of other adults determinedly (and obviously!) playing pretend, with terrible consequences.

https://lattice.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-responsible-ai-employment

(To clarify, I got out of cult world in very young adulthood, but for a long time, I assumed that those modes of thought, behavior, and control happened mostly in the religious environments I was familiar with. I was comically wrong.)

I grew up in a series of fairly extreme religious sects, including one full-blown very dopey cult, and maybe because of that, I failed for the longest time to understand that the same behaviors that drive delusional cult behavior are not just present but pervasive in tech, business, ~politics, and most other sectors of society, including the sciences. It is SO GOOBERY and disappointing.💀

I feel like there are very few good long-term guidelines for social media behavior but “try to work through your grief and fear without yelling at people who are working through their own grief and fear in their own way” feels like a solid candidate.

“To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.”

Fam ,

https://blog.mozilla.ai/uncovering-genai-trends-using-local-language-models-to-explore-35-organizations/

Someone else will say that if you don’t want everyone to be able to say whatever they want in your thread whenever they want to say it, you shouldn’t post in public because that’s the bargain.

But like…I don’t want the old bargain. The old bargain is kind of shit! We have a million ways to contain and shelter even “public” conversations offline, let’s have that in the good online places, too.

Believing you are morally entitled to reply directly to someone because they speak in public is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think being able to specify how you want to be interacted with is deeply humane. (And being able to do it after a thread starts to go sour is so important.)

Someone will ask why blocking doesn’t make this unnecessary and the short answer is that prevention is better than picking off unwanted interactions one by one, and having to process each one as you do it.

Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking.

I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.

✨💖💖💖☠️☠️☠️💖💖💖✨

ZELDA AS PROTAGONIST KLAXON

https://youtu.be/4kIXfBL6T3A?si=Z3Fr6NmwQrvemz1W

✨💖💖💖☠️☠️☠️💖💖💖✨

@mekkaokereke Full agreement, and fwiw I’ve also found that having alcohol (and alternatives) *around* during, say, an evening conference activity, is really different from “now we have the sponsored happy hour where the activity is just drinking.”

(My worst tech conference experience was in London and they had an open bar serving ONLY alcohol when everyone was tired and hungry and hot—you had to go find a water fountain if you didn’t want wine or beer. It got messy fast.)

I think this formulation matches my own sense of why some things feel weird and others don't, and I'm really interested in pinning down what it is about some implementations that produce that impression.

(I think obviously it's more than one thing.)

https://tenforward.social/@noracodes/112604903437836956

It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect."

Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you *can* do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map…

(I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.)

Last thing before I re-submerge—I think big emotional/instinctive reactions are so interesting and worthy of examination and usually point to meaningful low-level structural problems or disjunctures even when they seem to be about something else. (By low-level here I mean lower than protocol. Social contract stuff.)

@CyberneticForests's look at similar things here is really interesting

https://www.techpolicy.press/context-consent-and-control-the-three-cs-of-data-participation-in-the-age-of-ai/

Another POV I like a lot from Robert Gehl, who did a whole blog post:

https://aoir.social/@rwg/112605036119768467

https://fossacademic.tech/2024/06/12/Maven.html

Huge relief to see today’s ruling in Florida. (That moral arc bends toward justice if and when we bend it.)

Judge strikes down Florida’s restrictions on transgender care for minors and adults:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna156589

@evan Oh no, I mean when journalists collect up a bunch of e.g. tweets and post them with a couple of paragraphs and call it a story. (Really I mean when editors assign this kind of story.)

"Aggregate" is just how I've heard it talked about within journalism.

Is there a canonical essay about (the problems with and complexities of) social media aggregation as journalism that I can just link to so I don't have to break down the angles and weirdnesses myself?

There *has* to be, right?

(ht to @vortex_egg but on Bluesky for the link)