mindslight

No those are just "moderate" opinions of every day regular people, who were previously being "canceled" by "the far left". (/s)

The times I've had the misfortune of reading replies on xitter, even on what should be technical topics, they have consisted of extremist maximalist takes with others chiming in to call them "based" [0]. Whatever its "algorithm" is, it definitely leans into the outrage farming / Balkanization project, regardless of the bots.

[0] which from context would seem to be shorthand for "freebased", as in smoking crack, despite apparent intent to the contrary

I wholly agree with where you're coming from, but I don't see how it's connected to the original article.

If you think the censorship is the problem, then how does what you're saying address that?

If you think the frustration with the censorship is the problem (ie part of the outrage farming), then I suppose what you're saying is a solution in a roundabout way. But trying to fix a small problem by casting it as one aspect of a much larger problem seems self-defeating.

Do you know how the Enterprise is this huge ship that carries a huge population, but yet very few people are seen working in each department? Yeah, the rest of them just stay in their bunks doomscrolling, subsisting on Doritos and soda from the replicator ("Diet Coke, cold"). A significant part of government provided basic housing is on starships, because it gives their working crews a sense of importance. When a ship is in range of other ships, space stations, or planets, transporter technology is used to seamlessly reallocate the population. The residents would notice if they bothered to look out their windows, but they mostly don't. It's also why the rest of the ship is so austere - the working crew knows that indulging base material desires is the fast track to becoming a bunk dweller.

> I guess the best approach is to look at a string of such events, and see if they add up to a consistent pattern of behaviour.

Sure, except, why? Such behavior is (unfortunately) not currently illegal, so it's not like proving it would mean it could be straightforwardly punished.

Then furthermore, the specific groups that feel aggrieved shift based on who is in power. The only way to get actual reform is to form a coalition with people who don't feel particularly aggrieved right now, but still respect that it could happen to them in the future.

Making it into a personal us-vs-them just makes it so people who don't care about your "us" aren't inclined to see the issue!

> The change I would like to see: feeds must be in date order, most recent first. Posts should only appear in feeds if you have actively chosen to "follow" the originating account in some way.

Sure, but keep in mind this is still a political solution, whether through regulation or merely through shaming the centralizers. Meaning it requires the political will I am describing above.

Also from a technical perspective I don't see that this would directly address the problem in the article. You need an additional point, to get there indirectly - if the only feeds shown were subscribed ("followed"), there should never be a reason to censor an account from speaking to people who have subscribed to it or otherwise directly seek it out.

The simplest explanation is that it's chaotic damage from whatever overzealous autocensorship systems they have. The extent of the damage is moderated based on who you know - whether it's social media reach to someone employed there who knows the strings to pull, pay to play line to an account rep, or even ahead-of-time "this needs to be protected" due to threats/back scratching from/of the regime.

At least to me, this is a good working explanation - the conspiracy angles prove things that don't need to be proven to effect sustainable solutions. The real issue, as it has always been, is that we need to move away from these centralized communications technologies controlled by corpos. Their concentrated power is what makes their censorship inevitable.

So pragmatically as things stand - while it's completely understandable that political campaigns (and everyone else) need to engage with where people are, they should also be making it a point to nudge followers to distributed forums. Use censorship-eager popular forums to recruit new followers, but maintain your base of members with censorship-resistant communication methods.

Or politically, assuming a critical mass of people frustrated at this problem that we can effect change, what we need is anti-trust enforcement that breaks up these companies into smaller entities, chiefly by un-bundling apps (client software) from hosting services and mandating published APIs for the two markets to interact.

Sure, but the problem is that this is outweighed by the downsides to the law.

After a year of finishing projects with storage bought before the start of the second grump catastrophe (and seeing that everything has basically gone up in price 2.5x), I just had to break down and buy some DDR5 SODIMMS (which I had unfortunately not stocked up on). It hurt, and I am definitely wondering if this is going to look foolish in retrospect - ie buying at the peak.

But then I remembered that it's essentially a hedge. These people and the capital pools behind them give off strong vibes of being all-in on capturing computing technology for their centralized control, and damning the revolutionary distributed computation/communications we have been enjoying for the past three decades (albeit we've been squandering most of its capabilities).

No, I wasn't talking about the context of the reply chain... but rather the context of everything else a commenter does/says/believes.

The comment in question - go read a few pages of the poster's comment history and you will understand it was meant as sarcasm. The difficulty is that sarcasm takes social capital to execute, and the comment-in-isolation model eschews even having that type of reputation.

Now in this case it would have been relatively easy to avoid sarcasm (although tiring, and I would say we're worse off for it). But the same difficulty applies to straightforward communication as well - if someone is criticizing the DNC, are they doing it from a place of trying to reform and make it better, or are they trying to drive cynicism and apathy? You don't know unless you know them.

And while you can mitigate the problem by writing comments that appeal to some groupthink (marking you as part of the tribe) before making a nuanced point against some other bit of groupthink, this propagates the first groupthink (which is itself often a problem) as well as bad-faith commenters being able to perform the same pattern.

Personally I just click on people's usernames and skim a page or two of their comment history. I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as it strips all the surrounding context from what someone is saying. The whole reason I can discuss contentious issues with my friends is that they know I am not a monster, but this luxury just doesn't exist in web forums.

So especially in these times, I think it's important that we do a little work to see where one another might coming from [assuming it's in good faith to begin with], rather than squandering our focus on destructive infighting from slight misunderstandings.

And as the old joke goes - How do you know if someone is a maggot? Don't worry, they'll tell you!

I'm sure the video goes into more depth, but the "inevitability of hierarchy" explanation has never made sense to me.

If reactionaries place more importance on hierarchy, then shouldn't this mean accepting the hierarchy as it stands and knowing their place in it? Progressive beliefs are often seen as being a product of out of touch affluenza, so [stereotypical] progressives' relative direction in the hierarchy should be clear. Meanwhile the underclass below them with shittier jobs should make them feel content from being above a different group of people - illegal labor especially puts even more people below them!

Rather what they would seem to want is some other hierarchy where they sit higher. And while it's completely understandable to want to improve your position, it's specious to give this credit as some noble abstract belief in hierarchy rather than mere zero-sum scrapping to improve their lot.

So at least to me, reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of an [unfair] hierarchy doesn't seem like anything particularly different than reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of $whatever else to get them riled up and turn off their ability to reason or communicate. It's never actually about the lofty value, but rather emotional appeals to how you've been wronged so let's get revenge.

Arson when the fire department is already on the way. Great idea! Firefighters hate this one simple trick.

As an atheist, "religious claptrap" tends to contain more wisdom than average. Not inherently, but rather simply because reverence allows it to endure while more direct wisdom is readily thrown away for the sake of expedience. I think this is like one of the main themes of the piece itself.

All of the simplistic rejections in this thread, people looking to quickly assuage their cognitive dissonance rather than doing ten minutes of work holding conflicting thoughts in their head, make me think we are truly damned.

It's always fearmongering when it comes to "vulnerabilities" that affect the model of locking down computing devices.

This shit used to confuse me so hard when I was learning security. It seemed that articles were talking about something really important, but I just couldn't connect it to anything I knew. Then I realized they weren't talking about security for users, but rather security from users - and for entities ultimately looking to restrict users (the same inversion-of-authority as TSA propaganda). Hence the syndrome of acronym hell, as that amount of overabstraction is required to motivate a system for its own purposes.

Now given that this is a network exploit, you've got to adapt my model a bit from above - my framing is most clear when talking about local "exploits" in locked down bootloaders etc. But from an individual security perspective here? If you've disabled the network stack in your BIOS (because why the hell is it there in the first place), OR put any management interfaces on their own network unreachable from anything that isn't trusted to be managing, this is an utter nothingburger.

> You pretend to be righteous. I just am right.

As if asserting "I just am right" isn't being righteous...

It seems like you're trying to hang some moral authority on what is, even after having spent most of your time on what ought. But what ought - an abstract model of ideals - is exactly what defines us as thinking beings above the level of animals. Twisting your estimation of what ought based on what [presently] is drags us down to that lower level.

As for what is? That is easy! Would I have started moving my car after I was being assaulted by ICE agents? Probably not. Would I have engaged in the type of protest she did now that I have a kid? Fuck no. There are plenty of things Renee Good could have done differently to avoid being murdered that day! And I'm sure if she could have gone back and changed her actions after seeing the consequences they ended up having, she would have.

But still, none of this has any bearing on what ought to be in a society based around individual liberty and a government subservient to the People! And what ought to be, what we should be aiming for if we want to have a just society, is that murderers end up behind bars regardless if they happen to be employed by the government.