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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Didn’t Silicon Valley have them all flung into the abyss? Or maybe they were just a myth made up to annoy venture capitalists?

    (But yes, I probably should have said “freelance” rather than just “professional”. I haven’t actually thought very hard about how commercial moderation is done, beyond reading horror stories about Facebook)


  • Do any “ai” companies have a business plan more sophisticated than

    1. steal everything on the web
    2. buy masses of compute with vc money
    3. become too important to be busted for mass copyright infringement
    4. ?
    5. profit

    I don’t recall seeing any signs of creativity, or even any good ideas as to what their product is even for, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for one of the current crop to manifest creativity now.

    Perhaps I missed something, though?


  • The notion of “professional moderator” should perhaps ring some alarm bells. Sure, some people will be good at that sort of things, but:

    • being a moderator can be stressful or even traumatic, depending on the sorts of stuff your site is subjected to. Mods must take breaks from time to time, and modding several sites at once to pay rent seems like a route to a mental health disaster.
    • mods opinions should broadly reflect the ethos of the site and at least some portion of its user base. Selecting mods from that user base is one way to do this… finding non-users who don’t need time to get up to speed with the local situation seems challenging, unless you’re running a very generic bland corporate platform.
    • ACAB. People who seek out mod powers should be given a good deal of side eye. Assholes lurrrve positions of power and authority, asshole mods wreck communities, and finding non-assholes in good mental health who have the time and are prepared do the often unpleasant task of moderating your community seems challenging.

    treehouse.systems had a nice thread recently about their modding arrangement, but I can’t find a handy link to it right now.


  • I like the idea of small communities, but a major issue (possibly the biggest issue) as demonstrated by many mastodon servers over the years is longevity. What happens when your admin gets bored/burns out/dies/goes fash/is replaced with an asshole/is unable or unwilling to moderate effectively?

    I don’t particularly like the big mastodon hosts (eg. mastodon.social) but they’re probably still going to be here tomorrow, unlike eg. octodon.social who are winding down because adminning was too much (after 8 years, which was a pretty good run!) and they didn’t have any plans or processes in place to handle this eventuality.

    Between that sort of thing and stuff like matrix cryptography being full of holes and large matrix room management being a nightmare and email really being gmail, I’m slowly coming round to the idea that federation is too hard to do well and that if we could just manage a decentralised identity service and decent client software then it wouldn’t matter if servers didn’t talk to each other because we’d still have 90% of what people wanted from federation in the first place. Just a simple matter of engineering, I’m sure.









  • Meanwhile, for investors it can make it harder to identify genuinely innovative companies.

    The problem here isn’t AI, it’s that the investor class is fundamentally stupid. They got lucky, either by birth or by winning the startup lottery, and they’ve convinced themselves that this means they’re vastly more perceptive, intelligent and capable than everyone else.

    I’m working for a startup right now, and investment rounds feel a lot like a bunch of idiots standing around waiting to see who’ll jump first, and when one goes the rest follow, because they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re doing but desperately need to believe their peers do.