EgyptUrnash

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh I'm not saying these putative AI mods would be any better than existing Reddit mods. They'd probably be even more arbitrary and capricious and unappealable, and I sure don't expect them to be anywhere near fully-trained. But they'd be owned by Reddit, who would now be ⭐️⭐️⭐️AN AI COMPANY⭐️⭐️⭐️, which is the replacement for "the blockchain" as a thing you vaguely mention your company using if you want rich, dumb investors to wet their pants and throw tons of money at you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yes and no.

I run a Mastodon and occasionally attempt to push it out of "microblogging" and more into "Livejournal". God I fucking miss the days when me and my friends communicated by essays along with memey junk like "this quiz says my Hogwarts house is Slytherpuff" (it was okay to do those then, JKR had never even heard of "a trans" at that point). (And really Dreamwidth is still RIGHT THERE running a fork of LJ's old code, in a more financially sustainable fashion than LJ was, but I'm sure not doing anything to drag my friends there - I might have if the crossposter on my Wordpress blog would work with it but I could just never get that going.)

And I sure do miss the days of having one IM app on my computer. I didn't care if my friends were on AIM or Yahoo! or GChat or whatever, it all showed up in Adium for me. Now I have Telegram and Slack and Discord and they're all giant fucking CPU/RAM sinks running on a web browser under the hood, I've made life a little better by using Ripcord for those last two instead of the official clients but that sort of thing is really much less widespread than it used to be.

There's a lot of technical change but the big thing that really feels like the old days is the fact that we have a lot of communities being run and moderated by humans again, because they want these places to talk with their friends, or places to talk with folks who share some interest. This is in sharp contrast to the past decade of everything being run by corporations, who want a bunch of hyper-addicted, ultra-engaged eyeballs that never log off and get served a ton of ads, no matter what the cost to the people attached to those eyeballs. Sitting there going down a hate-filled extremist hole and becoming absolutely miserable? Who cares, you're making a lot of ad revenue for us!

It also reminds me of the days of dialup BBSs to an extent. Again, small communities, run for friends and interest-sharers, not for profit. Not that there weren't people turning that into a profit, see Rusty N Edies BBS for instance. And AOL and Compuserv and their ilk. But nobody had hit upon the magic formula of "serve people outrage and ads" yet.

(also, I am old - older than the entire HTTP protocol, and everything built upon it. My fursona is only four years younger than the WWW, if I go by the date her database object was created on Furrymuck.)

Overall it definitely feels nice to see the pendulum swinging back to smaller sites, loosely networked, where you can easily have multiple identities if you like. A single identity is nice when you want to be easy to find, but your parents and co-workers really don't need to know what you get up to on that vore chat, and nobody will be happier if they do learn!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (5 children)

My bet? AI.

If they have any kind of archive of past mod decisions then they can just dump all that into a neural net. And then they get to look all sexy in their upcoming IPO because they are using ⭐️⭐️⭐️ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE⭐️⭐️⭐️ like all the ⭐️⭐️⭐️SEXIEST⭐️⭐️⭐️ companies!!!1! No more of those annoying unpaid volunteers to get uppity any more!

I, for one, do not welcome our new AI moderation overlords, and will probably be done with Reddit if this happens. But I just know someone there has to be pushing for this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The last straw for LJ for me was when they made any mention of queerness illegal so as to conform to the laws of their new home country. I logged out and never logged in again. I still get badly-translated email about anniversary gifts for my various 13-year-old accounts now and then.

I have a DW account but it lies fallow, mostly because I could never get the auto-crossposter plugin to work on my Wordpress site.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The big sites got big by being there when a previous big site died. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a social site becomes desperately uncool because there are people old enough to have grandkids on it. And they totter on, like a zombie, until they fuck out badly, and most people leave. But not everyone, I still get linked to blog entries on Livejournal now and then, sometimes I even end up on Blogger when I’m following a trail and people are still updating some of those.

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