This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's amazing how much casually nicer lemmy and the greater fediverse is. You still see some bad habits leaking over from the rest of the web, but then people actually apologizing! and asking others to be nice! And it actually works!
Well outside of some thorny political issues, but that's just human nature.
it's more like the old internet or like old reddit.
As an old Reddit user, that’s why I came here. Just gotta get up the wherewithal to start/ recruit some of the niche subs I enjoyed most now.
Fewer people, more tightly connected communities... In old Reddit there was a point over which the sub was getting mainstream and then you would get gallowboob and other assorted jerks ruining everything
Totally disagree. If there was a way to disable comments about Elon Musk, Windows and Trump that would be great. I mean yeah I get it. Lemmy users don't like those topics but it seems like it's just constantly force fed to you on this platform. At least on Reddit you could filter certain subreddits out but here it seems to be everywhere.
From my perspective, most of the things I am seeing related to those topics seem to be what can pass for news. Many of them are being linked from reputable sources and it is genuinely important to keep up on details regarding the world. Especially when it is shit and going to hell. How else are the patient men going to run out of it? (yes, John Dryden had it right. Beware the fury of the patient man.)
I can say that I am abidingly patient, but I am running out very quickly knowing what the shitlords are doing.
That's not been my experience. I keep getting baited by ml power users and then banned for daring to question their orthodoxy. It seems intentional.
The downvote button is still abused as a "I don't agree with your opinion" button though...
"I don't agree" -> "the content of this comment is false, because it doesn't agree with what I believe to be true" -> "this comment provides no value, because its content is lies". There's no way you can prevent that chain of reasoning, especially since it's largely unconscious for most people.
yeah I don't really know how we can improve on that
I think lesswrong has an "agree/disagree" vote as well as a "this comment is/is not high quality and relevant button"
That reminds me, I once made my first political post on reddit and that got downvoted to oblivion. I would like to see how that exact same post would perform here on Lemmy.
"Free speech can't flourish online"
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LOL. Truth!
What happens on social media has nothing to do with free speech. If I can kick Nazis out of my bar , I can kick them off my website.
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn't a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn't a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
Screaming over everyone with megaphones about how they're not allowed to scream over everyone with megaphones, to a crowd that's 50% mannequins that have been wired up to play pre-recorded cheering.
Unfortunately, the discussion is important. Everybody hangs out in that public square which means everybody is forced to hear the megaphone Mein Kamph. It's how the far-right procreate now
The right wants to make it so that if you ban Nazis from a website, armed men from the government will come and arrest you. At the same time, they rant about being compelled to use transgender pronouns.
Free speech online doesn't even seem to be a particularly well-defined concept. Those who extol it the loudest are often looking to have the millionth "good faith discussion" about The Bell Curve, or use slurs as "just a joke", or promote a "dating and lifestyle coaching" business to teenage boys. If all they want is carte-blanche to say absolutely anything without being censored, I guess they only need to spin up a web server of their own, or run a lemmy instance. But what they actually want is to bypass the moderation rules on widely-used platforms and shit on the social contract. It's the same reason they don't show pornography, snuff footage, or other damaging content on television.
What they seem to want is a right to an audience.
No paywall: https://archive.ph/2023.11.12-212740/https://www.ft.com/content/8fde56b7-2515-441a-9472-30c8aedcc200
Tbh, the article doesn’t really talk about the headline. Just some history and talk about Elon musk and Twitter. Not a convincing argument about social media in general.
If you want a proper civilized discussion, head to pornhub. You're welcum.
Nothing makes my day more than clicking on a vid, then seeing some really intelligent shit in the comments.
People tend to reflect and post the outrage media they subscribe to, then look for echo chambers to reinforce those views. Reasonable opponents get exhausted and leave - and yes, IMO that’s what makes them reasonable, the ability to understand what they’re up against and quit a battle that cannot be won.
Also IMO the “gentleman’s agreement” we had, in the US at least, that free speech was somewhat honored most places including your job or online decades ago is dead. It’s quite clear that even the government isn’t too keen on the 1st amendment depending on who is in charge, much less corporations who will terminate people for speech conflicting with corporate agendas, and absolutely not petty or controlling forum moderators.
People that yell “muh freedum of speech!1!1!” the loudest are often the ones doing their best to force some hateful subjects or outright lies into other’s faces, then they get upset and claim they’re being attacked or bring up some other victim complex when they get “cancelled.”
I feel you are pointing in the right direction, but you did miss some stuff that is commonly missed. (I am going to preface that all I am doing is presenting facts, corps can burn in hell for my personal opinion)
Free speech cant flourish under corporate rule
Free speech has nothing to do with corporations? As long as the government doesn't start a social media platform, the First Amendment has 0 to do with any of them.
Free speech can't flourish online, says the paywalled article
Multiple US court cases have repeatedly affirmed the concept that money is speech because access to media costs, but if that's true and explicitly part of how it works, then media will always be dominated by those with the most money to create media.
All media ends up being shitty and awful because it's a business. It's always a business. When the Internet got big, businesses showed up and took a framework for cheaply exchanging information across large distances and turned it into Cable 2.0, because cable is inherently more like what they want than a powerful framework that empowers citizens to speak their minds or whatever. You know what people would do if they were really empowered to create their own media, and more importantly, create it on their terms? Nothing that makes businesses happy. They want you strapped in to an emotional manipulation machine that exists to convince you to buy things. They only want you posting because it helps them figure out what to sell to you and how.
Social media is an outrage machine for the exact same reason cable news is filled with horrible and terrifying imagery -- it hits your emotional buttons and keeps you coming back. Social media just makes the manipulation even easier and more fine-grained.
Well, "social media" and "online" ain't the same thing, now are they?
Well, mostly they are nowadays. Sure, there’s still old school forums and personal websites around but most people online interact via social media.
The old forums I used to go to don't exist anymore. One is now a separate entity from the sponsor company because they pivoted from renting game servers ( the old times when you could host your own private server) to telco and it lost all the value to have gamers attached to the image of the company. Also gamers in the meantime assumed another meaning entirely...
Is this an issue with.. social media, or corporate social media? Mastodon technically is social media and it can potentially have the problems of Facebook or Twitter, or not. Depends on the instance owners control. Even then, however they can't control every little detail when it's federated but, that's a good thing for the freedom of ideas.
If you want my actual opinion, places like Lemy and even Reddit are better for independent voices, because you can go into a dedicated community and get what you want specifically. While places like Mastodon, is more like a timeline of, hey I did this thing, or hey Elon musk did a thing today. Lemy is less like that, but it can also be like that.
Lemy or reddit seems to encourage discusion and Lemy seems to do great at it. The best interaction i've seen on an opensource social platform even compared to mastodon, dispite mastodon having more users.
I would have agreed with reddit before but the moderators are killing it the other way. Too much power, zero oversight, and quick to delete or even ban without having knowledge of what they're supposed to be moderating.
It's one of the reasons I'm here now, hoping for less of that. And I don't mean "the vaccines are making my 5G reception weak" type of posts. I mean factual information just getting removed of it doesn't align with the random moderator of the day when someone inevitably reports it. So much information there is scrubbed that's accurate and what remains is just an echo chamber of outdated or false information. I don't know how anyone can solve it other than relinquish control to our robot content moderator overlords.
The writer here seems confused. Free speech thrives online. There is no freer a place to speak than the Internet.
What they seem to take issue with is that free speech isn't always the path to truth. This was never a condition of free speech, and the lack of truth online doesn't make the speech there any less free.
In fact, free speech is the very force that allows people to lie with impunity. Maybe there would be more truth if speech were less free.
God I could kiss you. It's so weird. People have been just saying what's on their minds in chatrooms, forums, etc since the beginning of the internet, which was never scrutinized this much over being "factual". They were just expressing themselves. But now all of sudden we need a PSA to stop it lol
I think we've always thrived on outrage.
Before social media we had newspapers. Sure, we had real serious newspapers where the headlines where printed in a serif font, and mostly contained news about share prices and the political ramifications of abandoning the gold standard, but that wasn't what the masses bought.
We had tabloids. Look at what the BARMY EU want to ban now. Check out what BOFFINS are doing to dogs. Here's a 16 year old with her tits out. Look at this man on BENEFITS with 10 kids.
The only objective actual reporting in them was the sports pages at the back, and the TV guide in the middle.
We've always been like this. I have no answers how to make things better. We'd have to want to be better, and I don't believe most people do.
There's also no algorithm taking the most controversial answer and making it the top most comment ala Facebook.
This was clearly written by someone who has very little interaction with healthy forums for dialogue. There will always be trolls online and in real life, pretending like idiots and jokers only exist in an online setting is disingenuous or the view of a completely sheltered individual.
I couldn't even get to the article. My screen was immediately blurred on the top half, and the bottom half with a full width pop-up talking about "managing cookies".
(And yes, I know, but I not using my desktop, I'm using my phone.)
