🦊 OneRedFox 🦊 @ OneRedFox @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

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Checks out. I wouldn't want the US government doing it, but deplatforming bullshit is the correct approach. It takes more effort to reject a belief than to accept it and if the topic is unimportant to the person reading about it, then they're more apt to fall victim to misinformation.

Although suspension of belief is possible (Hasson, Simmons, & Todorov, 2005; Schul, Mayo, & Burnstein, 2008), it seems to require a high degree of attention, considerable implausibility of the message, or high levels of distrust at the time the message is received. So, in most situations, the deck is stacked in favor of accepting information rather than rejecting it, provided there are no salient markers that call the speaker’s intention of cooperative conversation into question. Going beyond this default of acceptance requires additional motivation and cognitive resources: If the topic is not very important to you, or you have other things on your mind, misinformation will likely slip in.

Additionally, repeated exposure to a statement increases the likelihood that it will be accepted as true.

Repeated exposure to a statement is known to increase its acceptance as true (e.g., Begg, Anas, & Farinacci, 1992; Hasher, Goldstein, & Toppino, 1977). In a classic study of rumor transmission, Allport and Lepkin (1945) observed that the strongest predictor of belief in wartime rumors was simple repetition. Repetition effects may create a perceived social consensus even when no consensus exists. Festinger (1954) referred to social consensus as a “secondary reality test”: If many people believe a piece of information, there’s probably something to it. Because people are more frequently exposed to widely shared beliefs than to highly idiosyncratic ones, the familiarity of a belief is often a valid indicator of social consensus.

Even providing corrections next to misinformation leads to the misinformation spreading.

A common format for such campaigns is a “myth versus fact” approach that juxtaposes a given piece of false information with a pertinent fact. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offer patient handouts that counter an erroneous health-related belief (e.g., “The side effects of flu vaccination are worse than the flu”) with relevant facts (e.g., “Side effects of flu vaccination are rare and mild”). When recipients are tested immediately after reading such hand-outs, they correctly distinguish between myths and facts, and report behavioral intentions that are consistent with the information provided (e.g., an intention to get vaccinated). However, a short delay is sufficient to reverse this effect: After a mere 30 minutes, readers of the handouts identify more “myths” as “facts” than do people who never received a hand-out to begin with (Schwarz et al., 2007). Moreover, people’s behavioral intentions are consistent with this confusion: They report fewer vaccination intentions than people who were not exposed to the handout.

The ideal solution is to cut off the flow of misinformation and reinforce the facts instead.

Firefish sounds like what someone would call malware targeting Firefox users. I was hoping the name would be better.

It's Mastodon with a better featureset and UX. Forked from the well-established Fediverse platform MissKey. Some things I like:

• Threaded comment replies (though they display differently from Lemmy's).
• Antennae for discoverability.
  • Can use hashtags AND keywords.
  • Can filter results by instance.
  • Can create multiple timelines to display content in.
• Customizable UI via widgets.
• I think the theming options are better.
• Full-text search.
• Quote posts.
• Cat mode.

There is WriteFreely, though it's light on features.

Just tried Piped for the first time and was sold when I got a page full of actually relevant search results instead of 6 relevant search results and then a bunch of garbage like I get on regular YouTube. Nicely done. 👍

Privacy-focused? GSMArena says this thing has a Qualcomm chip and Qualcomm was just caught phoning home without user consent with unencrypted personal data (even if you use a privacy OS); what does the phone do to mitigate this?

The average TV show has a 30-minute timeslot and about 21 minutes of actual show. The rest is for ads.

• Largest repos of any distro, so package availability is good (also supports Flatpak).
• All package installation and configuration is handled via config files, so it's easy to keep track of what's installed. Also makes re-installation convenient and easy (this is also great if you're fond of unixporn-style setups).
• Because it uses config files to manage this, you can also take advantage of VCS.
• Instead of having to work with several shitty DSLs to configure your system, now you only have to use one!
• Being able to install multiple versions of the same library is nice. With Nix you can just install whatever the fuck you want, really. Want to use DisplayCAL, but can't because it was dropped from the current release's repository for still depending on python 2? No problem, just have your flake pull it from a previous release when it was still in the repos; it'll just work because builds are done in isolation.
• The generation system makes updates fearless, since if something breaks you just rollback.
• Development is both better and more annoying. There's no FHS, so you have to set up a dev environment with a flake every time you want to do a project. This is nice because you don't miss dependencies as everything has to be explicitly laid out in the flake and other Nix/NixOS users can share your flake and get the same exact dev environment (kiss "it works on my machine" excuses goodbye). Annoying both because you're required to put in more forward planning with your dev environment and also because it breaks language-specific package managers, so you're limited to supported languages.
• You can't just git clone/make/install stuff from GitHub, as there needs to be a flake first. If the software already has one included, great! If it doesn't, you'll be making it. If you need a dependency that currently isn't packaged for Nix, you'll be making more than one. If the software is difficult to package, god help you.
• Nix documentation can be really lackluster and also assumes you're Linux-savvy.

Also how does user-level configuration work?

You use a 3rd party tool called home-manager for this. It provides about the same experience as the system config and has more configuration options for software, so should be preferred when it makes sense.

Overall, it's great if you're Linux-savvy and is one of the few distros that is legitimately innovative. Said innovation can also be a pain in the ass on occasion though, but still worth it.

TV is just baffling in the internet era. They pay up the ass to watch ads and I don't get it. Online when I pay for services it's to avoid ads, but TV viewers get the worst of both.

We are r/LeftWithoutEdge.

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about Threads privacy policy lately, where people seem genuinely shocked about it.

I know I shouldn't still be jarred by stuff like this, but I am. It's like when I encounter people who don't use adblockers and they just sit in their chair and watch that shit. I really wish normal people gave more of a shit about this stuff.

Oh hey, I recognize your username from our subreddit. Welcome and thanks for making the move.

The botting and astroturfing was already out of control. It's going to be so much worse going forward.

Been using Linux for over 10 years at this point. Haven't considered going back to Windows. Even put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME without issue.

Federation is not that complicated to understand or work with.

Yep. Anyone who's worked with email before should already be somewhat familiar with how this works. I personally side-eye the users I see on the corporate platforms saying that the sign-up process is too complicated. If you can't decide on an instance in the long list of instances that every Fediverse platform provides, just pick the first one and make an account somewhere else later if you end up not liking it as there is no limit on making accounts; IMO this isn't a difficult conclusion to reach.

I like Citations Needed.

Normal subs had too many chuds and lefty subs had too many tankies

Yep. I was initially attracted to the users that were present from 2014-2017. Over the years I noticed that the communities I had frequented, both leftist and tech subs, had hollowed out and become shells of their former selves. I spent a year and a half wondering where the users I liked had migrated to and searching for them. Search engines are increasingly useless these days as everything retreats behind walled gardens and SEO gentrification runs wild. I had been a Mastodon user for years and I recently noticed at the time that they implemented the ability to follow hashtags, so I tried that out and started building a feed. To my surprise, I found them at last. In hindsight, it makes sense. The Fediverse are FOSS platforms that are decentralized. Mastodon in particular also opts you out of search engine indexing by default. But yeah, feels nice to be reconnected with the demographics I liked.

Maybe my problem is with redditors

Yeah, probably. That site has a problem with racism/sexism/queerphobia because the admins have consistently refused to properly deal with the site's problems for basically its entire existence. I still recall CNN having to goad Reddit into banning the jailbait subreddit.

but at the very least reddit was equipped to keep the dumbest of dumbasses out of visibility.

lmao, I wish mate. It's less of an issue in smaller niche subs, but the defaults/large subs have been garbage for a long time.

At this point, I already have a fairly negative view of the fediverse.

The Reddit-like portion is dealing with a bunch of bullshit right now due to the protest and exodus bringing in tens of thousands of users from a website that has a fairly reactionary baseline in the first place. The rest of the Fediverse has largely not been impacted, though. You should try Calckey; it's a Twitter-like platform, but it also has threaded comment replies (it displays differently than Reddit's, though). It'll give you something to do while the dust settles and content moderation on Lemmy/kbin can get sorted.

Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.

He was taken from us too soon.