Notices by Richard (richard_merren@mastodon.social), page 2

@dansup Terminator 7 plot: Skynet was not an AI. It was a cat placed in charge of a single website that took over the entire net and started exterminating humans and dogs with killer robots. But a brave dog is sent back in time to stop her...

@dansup They might even have multiple algorithms you can choose from, or allow api access to provide your own algorithm, or join up with some sort of federated sites algorithm, or whatever. The key differences with current platforms should be 1) they will offer users options with transparency, and 2) algorithms will be to the user's benefit and not be built around the goal of offering users up to advertisers.

@dangillmor Multiple stupid things are beginning to converge and are creating superstupid.

@victor @miaq This is nuts. Flip has many years experience providing links to websites and they know better than to do this.

@dansup @Gargron I was curious about this and so I looked at the code. The scoring for trending tags is not based directly on raw numbers of nentions but on the level of recent increase in mentions compared to historical norms. So to get a high trending score and make the boards, you need to see a big jump in tag usages over the previous day and not just have more tag usages than somebody on the board. Probably no conspiracy.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/app/models/trends/tags.rb

P.S. open source software is awesome

@sundogplanets L1