Some day, we'll have a technology sub that isn't polluted with Twitter "news".
It's a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.
Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch platforms combust due to their own arrogance.
We'll save you a seat, but you'll need to bring your own popcorn.
Anyway I'm glad this shitshow happened because it was a much needed boost for federated software like Lemmy.
These were weeks where decades happened.
And remind ourselves that it find very easily happen to the fediverse! All it takes is mass defederation, some vulnerability, anything ego driven.. humans still run this platform and it wouldn't take much to bring it down.
Never understood why we call them tech companies to be honest. There is nothing technologically interesting at twitter. And if there is... it is never the subject.
So I think the main thing is scale—they're tech companies (in the category they're in) because of the engineering required to build & maintain something that operates at the scale they do
And IMO at least in the early years it was pretty impressive what Twitter was capable of in terms of technology.
If I remember, tech companies are generally those whose primary products are digitally based. And technology these days has essentially become synonymous woth the internet.
Let's hope "X" continues down the path to it's own demise.
I'm still waiting for any article that talks about the tech that Twitter is supposed to be so famous for.
What Twitter did well I think was handle the non-trvial problems of scale, and did a fairly credible job of content moderation. I can find fault with a lot of how they handled that but they did honestly try. Becoming the dominant platform is always largely luck, but had they not adequately handled scale and content they would not have lasted for so long. Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.
Twitter like it or not has been pivotal for connecting people around the world especially those with less developed infrastructure. The Arab Spring events would not have happened without it. Which is why I think the Saudis were happy to give Elon money. They knew he'd either make it more friendly for them, or kill it and they'd have a hold on him because of the money he owes.
This is a bit of a learning experience though.
The big tech companies advocated during 2020 that they were not biased and should not be held responsible for policing the Internet.
Since then, FB swapped to Meta to cover up the documents showing FB is intentionally causing psychological damage our children because it gives them more clicks/view time.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
Twitter, a social media company known for free speech, was bought by Musk, a former Trump associate. Trump was reinstated during this period and dissent was banned.
Google decided to push web DRM to force us to use their software or else we can't access the Internet.
Sounds like they very much want to police the Internet. We just aren't putting the pieces together in a collective way.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
I'm not a huge OpenAI fan, but it's not yet been determined that they acted illegally. I believe the matter is still being pursued in court.
I think people are too focused on the scraping, which is clearly not illegal, but is what the roch people who own the websites are hollering about because they wanted to make money off of selling the posted content they did not actually own
Open AI's implementation of image creation in the style of a particular artist using copyrighted works is going to be the big outcome.
It's not illegal for a person to learn things online. That's one of the original purposes of the "world wide web" when it was opened to universities.
It is illegal to copy someone's brand and use it to make money. These chat bots are literally charging people to take input like "write a story in this author's style" and outputting a story that is a poor mimicry. The main problem is they are charging money based on someone else's trademark. Not that they write a similar story.
Immorally then.
Illegally, maybe. Immorally, probably not. It’s fine for a human to read something and learn from it, so why not an algorithm? All of the original content is diluted into statistics so much that the source material does not exist in the model. They didn’t hack any databases, they merely use information that’s already available for anyone to read on the internet.
Honestly, the real problem is not that OpenAI learned from publicly available material, but that something trained on public material is privately owned.
On Reddit I've found most of the news about the big social networks is posted by only handful accounts, they also don't post other interesting things, so you can just block them.
I'm hoping that'll work on Lemmy as well.
Salon.com articles always sound like a 21 year old Redditor wrote them.
“The grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex are not okay.”
Who writes this lmao. Do they spin a wheel of buzzwords and just write a sentence with whatever comes up?
Amanda Marcotte is the author, a reasonably distinguished and well known figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte
I thought it was the same thing that happens with these "content creator" in every niche. Over saturation requiring these greater extremes to get more attention.
Always remember to never feed the trolls. It's a very basic Internet rule that we should have continued to follow. Block and move on
i think in this case we also want to consider...
do not click a twitter link
... as the article states, it is the traffic, itself, that they want.
Even better. Don't click on Twitter and don't engage with trolls in any format.
Sounds like a surefire way to get Donald Trump elected again.
Ignoring the trolls caused 2016 to happen. At that point, it became clear that the trolls have gathered in power, have organized politically and have explicitly made their methodology into the leading political force for the Republican party.
Ehhh… more like the opposite. The mainstream media engaged the trolls on a mass scale and the golden turd won.
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