Anomander

I normally hate turning to Youtube when there’s a text resource available, but I’ve definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.

Also, on the subject of this song being “breakout/viral” - how hard is it to manipulate streaming numbers?

It’s seemed like the numbers there are 'semi-'manipulated in the way that Kpop can be - hugely inflated by deliberate rewatching and multi-platform streaming, but by individuals who genuinely want the song to do well, rather than bots or purchased fake stats.

It’s really seemed like ‘the right’ sees Oliver Anthony as “their guy” and rallied behind him and his song in order to push it up the charts as an imagined way of ‘owning the libs’ - and I think OA’s industry backing worked hard to seed that narrative among those circles in order to elicit that sort of boosterism from them.

There’s the necessary info, thank you! - I’ve heard horror stories about hosting exit nodes, and was immediately spooked this would result in the same issues.

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on ‘rival’ platforms.

This would make excellent satire, but it’s pretty dismal journalism.

Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.

Speak for yourself, please.

Many millennials who ‘work on the internet’ have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.

You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.

And that’s still true - it’s just less and less likely to include someone’s twitter in that assessment.

I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.

Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called “change” occurred and it’s no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.

That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.

Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.

Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. […] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.

Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They’re doing it all over again; and in ten years we’ll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.

Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that’s one of the best changes they’ve made in ages and I’m glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it’s been an occasional frustration to hit ‘hide’ by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.

My comment was clearly not written to give you advice for your specific child and her suite of issues.

I’m speaking a lot more generally and while I’m leaving room for parents like you to make your choices, I’m also still being direct that I think it’s not a good universal rule. Even if that is an outcome someone chooses, it’s no less true that engaging with the whole choice is necessary to do a good job of making it. Internet=bad is an incredibly simplistic old-person take at this stage in society, and some parents even to current generations can misunderstand or underestimate the significant role that the internet can play in their kids’ lives. No solution fits across all kids, that’s part of the challenge - but understanding the role that the internet plays in modern kids’ social world and peer networks is important to making decisions about their access to it with complete information and goal-oriented integrity.

The matched point in that comment you may have missed is that I’m not modelling my remarks around a binary of “unrestricted internet” vs “no internet.” If anything, I think I was clearly saying that absolute ‘solutions’ get progressively worse the wider they cast their net - as more and more unintended consequences are included in that broad-reaching choice.

Separately, you also shouldn’t expect that what you felt you needed to do in order to support your child in a relatively unusual situation - will also be a good foundation for broad-case parenting practices. What is good for one child is not good for all children - and the more unusual the child or their needs, the less applicable that solution would be to “average” kids. There are other kids in similar-looking situations where your solution would exacerbate the problem instead of reduce it - now not only are they depressed and bullied, but also isolated from their friends. The vast majority of kids aren’t in situations particularly similar to yours and using your solution in their cases risks putting them into worse places than they started, or putting a target on them where none existed prior. Sever the child from the internet isn’t something you necessarily should be treating as universally good for all parents and all kids with zero possible downsides.

There are always downsides. Especially in parenting, everything is a trade-off and nothing is clear-cut. If you can’t see what’s being traded off - in effectively anything - that’s a good cue to start hunting for blind spots. Especially when making rules for kids like cutting off parts of their world. As you said, being a parent requires making tough choices, and that requires engaging with the whole cost/benefit of the choice.

There’s nothing challenging or tough about firmly believing you are wholly, completely, and absolutely Correct in whatever option you pick. It’s easy to choose something and insist that it’s 100% totally and absolutely correct with zero room for discussion. That approach actively shuts down all the actually hard parts of making the choice. But that is a choice with it’s own downsides. It makes it hard to relate to those kids as they age enough to challenge you, or start leaving home, and it doesn’t model behavior that I - personally - think is producing functional adults down the road. At the very least, the kind of person who is never wrong is not the kind of person I want to raise.

So I think that commenting more specifically on what you’ve said here - it rings some bells and tints some flags. You’re proudly teaching your kids critical thinking, yet also say you cannot see any downsides to cutting off social media completely. You’re absolutely blase about deeming all kids who use social media “toxic” and “bad friends” with “struggles” as if it’s completely normal, healthy, and definitely non-toxic for an adult to be passing those kind of judgements about children on such a trivial basis, and to model that for their own kids. You talk about one child’s needs to justify the choice, but have more than that one affected by it. You reacted as if this is already a hot-button issue to you - and responded to remarks clearly speaking generally and not at all targeting to you as if it was a personal attack, returning fire with a bunch of spicy jibes about me as a person and as a parent. If this is how you experience and respond to an opinion you disagree with on the internet, I can certainly imagine how you deal with faintest hints of dispute from your own children. Of course they’re telling you what you want to hear.

The calls are coming from inside the house, friend.

I think that this is like wrapping a kid in bubble-wrap, though. And like, not in that “over-coddling” metaphorical sense, but much more literal - sure, the kid can’t get scrapes if they fall off their bike, but the other kids are going to make fun of the kid wearing bubble wrap.

You don’t necessarily want to give them an unrestricted mainline to the worst of the internet, but you don’t want to overcorrect so hard that you’re causing other problems.

As toxic as it is, as much as there’s space for harms and bullying, or that the internet holds porn and violent content … the internet and social media spaces are where a huge portion of kids social lives live, and barring them from participating in that will do one of two things - teach them to get sneaky in order to bypass the restriction, or force them into an ‘outsider’ role in their peer group. In the first, it’s a lost cause and all you’re doing is making it inconvenient without addressing the harms - and ensuring they can’t talk to you about what comes from that space. In the latter, there are strong social and self-esteem costs associated with excluding your child from having a social life with other children - is it “better” for the parent to do the harm instead of the other children? Is it better for your relationship with that child, long-term, their trust in you, or your ability to support them?

The kid restricted to “dumb phone only, no internet, no apps” is the current generations’ equivalent of that one kid that wasn’t allowed to go to the park, or the mall, or hang out on the street - whatever any given past generation used as their youthful Third Place, where they could socialize and hang out separate from school and without adults actively supervising them. And it’s never been great for the kid whose parents won’t let them participate in the common social life that their peers have.

It’s far more fruitful to give them age-appropriate education related to their use of and relationship with the internet and provide a controlled and supported introduction than it is to simply bar their access for several years. You’re either stunting their social development in order to avoid harms to their social development (?!?!) or you’re simply winding the proverbial rubber band tighter and tighter against an inevitable rebellion - at which point they’re jumping in headlong without ever developing any sort of media literacy or social media savvy and never had a chance to build coping and resilience for whatever rabbit holes they’re likely to fall into .

Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.

There’s been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren’t coming to our spaces. Mods will post “going to Discord, fuck this place” and they’re like “it’s temporary, Discord isn’t a forum”.

Sure; it’s just so good at being a chat app that it makes a terrible forum.

My understanding is that it can be done and with a whole host of third party tools and bots and a little legion of mods - but that’s a ton of work both setup and ongoing, just to reshape Discord into the sort of format that Reddit or Kbin/Lemmy offer pretty much right out the box.

I keep mine next to my tiger-repellent rock!

I’m no GPT booster, but I think that the real problem with detectability here

It will almost always be detectable if you just read what is written. Especially for academic work.

is that it requires you to know the subject and content already, and to be giving the paper a relatively detailed reading. For a rube reading the paper, trying to learn from it - a lot of GPT content is easily mistaken as legitimate. And it’s getting better. We’re not safe simply assuming that AI today is as good as it will ever get and the clear errors we can detect cannot ever be addressed.

Penetrating academic writing, for academics, is probably one of the highest barriers of any writing task, AI or not.

But being dismissive of the threat of AI content because it’s not able to convincingly fake some of the hardest writing that real people do is maybe sidestepping a lot of much more casual writing - that still carries significance and consequence.

Worth noting they’re not just ‘discontinuing’ coins and awards - but removing them retroactively.

This Admin comment notes that the awards themselves will be removed, so posts and comments will no longer display the awards they received; it’s not just that the feature is being sunset, but all awards will vanish from the site.

As long as they honor what people have currently bought,

From the announcement, this is a “yes, but also no” because any unused coins on an account stop being honoured after Sep 12, when there will no longer be awards to purchase with them.

So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?

Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there’s a crisis in the ‘main’ one.

lmao that is such a good descriptor of what’s going on there. Elon figured he could make money from racists wanting to be racist around normal people.

The thing there is that like … it’s not about consistency or values. The fact that he lied is meaningless to him, throwing it in his face is wasted effort. Communication is a tool to get what he wants, not a goal unto itself.

And no one is surprised.

Elon made it clear shortly after taking over that “free speech” was speech he happened to agree with, and he had no intentions of ethical consistency on ‘free speech’ when it came to speech that was critical of him or his platform. Twitter already went nuclear on links to Mastadon and similar alternative platforms earlier this year while their dumpster fire was raging.

According to the people most likely to feel oppressed by the existence of rules limiting what they can do or say, yes.

Practically speaking? No. Reddit branded itself as “free speech” and pseudo-libertarian during it’s launch phase, from a combination of the political leanings of its founders and as a cynical branding decision to differentiate itself from its competition. It never actually was a free-speech platform, so much as a platform that saw free speech as a branding decision and would generally aim to preserve that veneer when there wasn’t a good reason to go against it.

In addition to the legal arguments around “platform” vs. “publisher”, a solid portion of how the subreddit system started and why it’s structured the way it is was so that Reddit Inc and Reddit.com could posture as being broadly “pro free speech” while letting mods take the heat for the content being removed.

During the Yishan/Pao eras, people were forever citing Swartz, Spez, and kn0thing as OG founders who believed in “free speech!!” that new admin and bad mods were destroying their original vision. The Spez came back and made it clear he’s not aligned that way. kn0thing very publicly and firmly stated that Reddit was never about absolute free speech and admin had been quietly removing shit for years, this time Pao just announced it. So now you still get originalists trying to argue that Swartz was a free speech absolutist founder whose vision supersedes all the rest as the Pure and True and justifying their outrage. I think if Swartz were still alive during that fiasco, he wouldn’t have been digging in to defend their absolute right to screech slurs at people or rally hate brigades against the spherically-inclined; or even continuing to support free speech absolutism in abstract for the platform.

Was this written by GPT?