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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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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.
Remember the old memes? Those were the days...
In AD2001, memes were beginning.
*laughs in Cats*
Turns out X is giving it to itself. Ironic.
Fuck waitin' for you to get it on your own
X gon' deliver to ya
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.
the Fediverse is growing, but still small. If anything (as much as I'm personally enjoying it) at this stage of growth, it would be still statistically likely to fade to irrelevance in a few years, so it would not even be big news. Seeing a couple of the Big Socials being dismantled this way at the same time is... something else. I'm getting tired too of all this coverage about Twitter and Reddit and start wishing Lemmy had filtering by keyword, but rationally I know it's granted.
I believe some of the apps do have keyword filtering, but idk which ones.
Might be worth looking into if it’s something you want to avoid.
thanks, I was starting to look into some of the apps, but so far I haven't found one that works better for me (on Android) than the mobile web version. I have never looked specifically into keyword filtering though.
Elon calls them Rapid Unplanned Disassemblies.
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.
Their content filtering/categorisation was also quite good. They're one of the few sites I can think of that had a bit more clarification than a basic "NSFW/Sensitive Content" tag, even if it came rather late, so if something was marked correctly, you could get an idea of what kind of NSFW content it was, without unblurring the image.
They made the popular CSS framework Bootstrap, which led to thousands of new websites for a while looking the same. 😅😬
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.
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.
This feels like Andy Warhol's art combined with TPB's court processing.
Andy earned money buy making art using other's art and TPB sold ads while telling you where you could aquire content illegaly, while never actually hosting any of the content.
Where does the line go? If I write a book the is similar to someone else's book, is that illegal? If I use a tool to help me write? Which tools are allowed and which are not?
It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
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.
Is that really a problem? Is a create something new based on public knowledge, should I not be able to profit from it?
I learn to paint from YouTube, should I paint for free now?
I'll admit that the scope of ChatGPT is MUCH bigger than one person painting.
I’d say that was a more controversial opinion. From a purist perspective I tend to believe that intellectual property in general is not ethical and stifles innovation.
Well, I suspect since free money is gone, everyone's looking at private "donations" which also have private incentives.
Higher interest rates. Free money means you can spend a lot on trash projects that generate hype but no money. Expensive money means every dollar needs revenue.
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.
Click on their name, on the upper right of the page you end up on will be two buttons, "Send Message" and "Block User". Hit the latter.
And welcome aboard! (I'm a fairly new Lemmy immigrant as well)
blocking is there , go to user profile
an example of spammers is this https://lemm.ee/post/2676046 , that user made 593 posts in 80 days , 7.4 each day
That's just true of social media in general. 1% of the accounts generate 99% of the content.