Notices by Tom Bellin :picardfacepalm: (tob@hachyderm.io), page 3

@BlackAzizAnansi I saw a clip of a Trumper being interviewed, and he was asked if he wanted Trump to be "a dictator for 4 years" and I thought... that's not how dictators work.

@thomasfuchs You forgot the most important part. It's slower, worse, AND more expensive! Cha-ching!

@polotek Sorry. Would you like me to delete my replies?

@polotek I did not intend to fight with you. I don't disagree with you.

My point was only that I don't think the source of the toxicity lirs in the QT functionality. In my personal experience, it was almost always used positively.

Twitter's QT functionality also allowed trolls and bad actors to take control of other people's content for their own purposes. That transfer of power is what enables the abuse.

That led to bad patterns like users searching for their own name.

@polotek The "affordances" are removing the context and control from the original author.

Which may well be necessary and justified. As I said, it's something missing from masto. But it's not just about the way the feature was abused on Twitter.

It's also about giving ownership to users as authors & owners of their content. QT lets me take your content and use it to drive a conversation that excludes you.

Imo that change of control is at the heart of the toxic behavior associated with QT.

@polotek Honestly, I miss the ability to quote-boost. But I think it's OK that it's not on here even if it's not perfectly convenient.

The thing I really enjoy about Mastodon is that it treats everyone as a first-tier contributor. And part of that is the way that every user is given extensive control over the use of their posts.

QT takes that control away from the author (in the case of "dunking" that's precisely the use case for the feature).

@thomasfuchs The strategy of breaking complex problems into small pieces that can be solved falls apart if you cannot acknowledge an unsolvable problem/contradiction. In that situation, the tendency is to abstract away the contradiction.

In a liberal society, many conflicting views can be (and should be tolerated). The one view that cannot be tolerated is intolerance. This is a contradiction.

Your software engineer, instead of acknowledging the contradiction, has chosen to abstract it away.

@thomasfuchs "I was going to view for Joe Biden, but then I saw liberals celebrating Kissinger's death, and now I'm a Nazi. Thanks, liberals! Thanks for making me a Nazi!"

@thomasfuchs I've hacked into the future and your haircut will be the height of popularity in 2024.

@thecorodon methinks the AI isn't so good at writing scripts.

@thomasfuchs This is the most I've ever wanted to vote twice in a poll.

@thomasfuchs You can't just mash a bunch of use cases together and declare that "a vision." Well, obviously you can when your boss is a dumdum. But... nobody wants this thing she's describing.

And Musk owns it? Come on.

@inthehands If you assume the purpose of these voluntary "commitments" is as propaganda to reduce the pressure for governed regulation, then one would expect that as the prospect of government regulation becomes more certain these commitments would vanish.

The oil companies know the jig is up. The world is on fire in exactly the way they've known it would be.

It's hard to overstate how evil they are.

@carnage4life I am deeply skeptical that "federation" means the same thing to Threads as it does in the fediverse.

Would Threads legitimately allow users to move their entire Threads profile to another server? Does that sound like something Meta would *ever* do?

There are other logistical issues with federation (e.g., moderation for 100 million users) that I don't think Meta has any interest in actually solving.

Federation really isn't the thing you do last. It's a core feature.

@doot Will someone please explain to me how people who maintain and fly their own airplanes are different than spiders? Explain it to me like I am 5.

@SusanLewis There seem to be numerous regulatory bodies around the world. Any one of which would have prevented this numbskull from perpetrating this calamitous farce.

So, of course, being a billionaire brain genius, he twisted himself in knots specifically to avoid their jurisdiction.

@inthehands I am not worried about Meta devouring Mastodon because Mastodon is small potatoes.

We have 15M users, most of whom aren't active. Yeah, Meta doesn't GAF about us.

The danger, then, is that Meta takes ActivityPub and makes it an actually commercially viable social media platform... Er... Somehow.

Like I said, I'm not worried.

@inthehands @davealvarado That is the lever that online communities have, but it's unlikely to work here.

Reddit is shifting models from chasing users (dubious) to extracting value from users. If they fail, the IPO dies. So MAD here is not an option.

Reddit's already looking at their own destruction. Their only way out is to bowl through their users' objections.

@thomasfuchs Tomorrow will probably be Google's turn!

@inthehands Except their answer to the problem is that every new user who signs up for mastodon starts on their server.

That's... not great.