JubilantJaguar @ JubilantJaguar @lemmy.world

European. Contrarian liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. **I nev

---

Read more

Posts

11

Comments

1,482

Joined

2 yr. ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instance_(computer_science)

Same, same, and same.

I like it. The reasoning's good.

I hate the term "instance". It's hopelessly geeky (it derives from object-oriented programming). It brings to mind nerds and gamers in basements.

Your argument seems a bit redundant then. Journalists and news platforms are already "held accountable" when they get things wrong: their reputations suffer.

Assuming you mean laws (which is what you seem to be insinuating without daring to say it), this is an absolutely terrible take.

Laws to make journalism "accountable" are at the top of every authoritarian government's wishlist. In Russia, you get 15 years for publishing "knowingly false information" about the armed forces (where the meaning of "false" is decided by the prosecutor). Since Trump debased this concept of "fake news", authoritarian regimes around the world have used it as a pretext for new laws.

In China, meanwhile, journalists are not even allowed to "undermine national harmony" and similar nebulous ideals. Even in Britain, the libel laws are so tough that it can be very expensive to make even a small mistake when talking about individual rich people. The Trump administration is pushing for a British-style libel laws in the US.

The end result of making journalism "accountable" is to shut up all opposition to power. That is a very dangerous road to go down.

The correct answer.

It's an attractive vision. And yes, it's probably even technically possible, the BitTorrent algorithm was designed for exactly this purpose.

That's fair but I think you're both worrying a bit too much. Astroturfing is a problem, sure, but it's a first-world problem compared to spyware-driven engagement-maximization algorithms.

Yep but important to note here that decentralized social media based on video is always going to be a challenge because of the hosting and bandwidth costs of video.

Not really. It's mainly because the site belong to idealists and hosting is cheap because it's text.

Much harder to pull off algorithmic ad tech when it's genuinely decentralized. And if it happens here I'll be gone and I won't the only one.

The major benefit of distributed social media comes from one thing: no ads.

It's the ad-supported business model that creates terrible incentives:

• to spy on the user in order to better guess what they might pay for
• to concoct algorithms that boost the user's engagement using rage, anxiety, controversy

Virtual socializing does carry drawbacks, as you say. Particularly the problem of group bias reinforcement, i.e. echo chambers and bubbles. But the really bad externalities of modern corporate social media can be traced to one thing IMO: advertising.

True

This guy is obviously borderline famous in Thailand, but all anyone here wants to know about is his money situation! Ahh Americans.

regime

It's still a government, give it a couple of years.

OP won the thread before the first response arrived.

Isn't this like saying "What phone numbers do you have in your address book?"

I share your concern and considered posting the same question.

This is exactly how I do things too.

It's all in the backend of Twilio